And what's going on here — mostly typos?!:The logic flow diagram for the Social Security system looks INSANE. No one person actually knows how it works.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2025
The payment files that move between Social Security and Treasury have significant inconsistencies that are not reconciled. It’s wild. https://t.co/BQUyxG72AC
AND: John Fetterman attacked — displaying a Politico headline ("Possible DOGE access to private taxpayer data sparks outcry") — tweeted: "I want to save billions of your money and make our government more efficient. Rummaging through your personal shit is *not* that. A party of chaos loses—always."According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2025
Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security 🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/ltb06VX98Z
And Musk shot back: "Bruh, if I wanted to rummage through random personal shit, I could have done that at PAYPAL. Hello??? Having tens of millions of people marked in Social Security as 'ALIVE' when they are definitely dead is a HUGE problem. Obviously. Some of these people would have been alive before America existed as a country. Think about that for a second …"
ADDED: “No, 150-Year-Olds Aren't Collecting Social Security Benefits” (Wired). It’s a quirk of using COBOL, we’re told.
Posts
113 comments:
Those over 150 are data entry mistakes. Those between 112 and 150 are buried in their grandkids backyards.
According to Google AI, there are about 100,000 centenarians in the US.
The Twilight Fringe is a place and state of mind conceived in a conflation of logical domains where life is a "burden" and death is progressive.
Just stop paying everyone older than 110.
Over 20 million centenarians? How many of these numbers are still getting Social Security payments or have gotten them in the past 5 years?
The data is analyzed without personal attribution, which is more than can be said for DEI, redistributive change schemes, cancel culture, human rites, etc.
What a country! We’re the biggest innovators of technical wizardry and we don’t even think to apply it to our own governmental systems. Scratch that, we choose not to apply it to our own systems…. Disgusting.
Democrat stages of SS grief:
1. There is no one collecting SS by mistake or fraud, it is pristine.
2. There may be a few data entry errors.
3. Elon is a criminal for looking at this private data.
4. THESE HUMANITARIAN ACTS OF FRAUD ARE KEEPING MILLIONS OF POOR PEOPLE ALIVE YOU RASIST!
Fetterman apologizes for the kleptocracy? He is a leftist at heart.
Democrats saw no problem with doxxing conservative donors. Or legal gun owners.
Are these dead people voting?
I'd like Elon to check with actual experts before issuing tweets. They exist. IRS has plenty of willing whistleblowers. Not all apparent folly is fraud.
What a lot of people miss is that President Trump did not create Doge. Obama created it in August 2014. He created it to find bogus payments and he created it specifically authorizing it to rummage around in Fetterman's and everyone else's personal files.
If you want blame someone, blame Obama.
Here is the still live, if not exactly up to date, website created by Obama https://www.usds.gov/
John Henry
Yet another claim that will be walked back and amended in a few weeks. You know, like self driving, which was promised 5+ years ago.
Ann Althouse said...
Are these dead people voting?
Shame on you, Ann. You are spreading doudt and leading to a lack of confidence in the US electoral system.
Unless states go to Puerto Rico style elections (pre '24) where everyone shows up in person between 9AM and 2PM and presents a voter ID card before voting on paper ballots, dead people probably are voting.
They started voting in 24 in Puerto Rico when we started having elections where you did not have to show up.
Our turnout is way down too 64% in 24 vs 80-90% traditionally.
John Henry
The important question is how many checks are going out to these data points...and where are they going?
Amazing how many doggedly skeptical deniers of government legitimacy and honesty hungrily lap up as fact every slop bucket of (unsourced) random claims, criticisms, and dire warnings about the state of Social Security (and every other area he is "auditing" with his skeleton band of barely post-pubescent Wild Boys).
(BTW, why is "DOGE" pronounced as "Doje." The "G" in the acronym refers to "Government," a hard "G." It should be pronounced either as DOG with a long "O," or as I prefer, DOGGIE.)
Any reaction other than 'This is unacceptable!' is unacceptable.
And the Althouse Lefties put in an appearance. Elon Must've hit a nerve.
"with his skeleton band of barely post-pubescent Wild Boys"
As long as they meet the qualifications for the job they're doing, why does their age matter?
BTW... the youngest is 19, Democrats want to allow 16-year-olds to vote.
It's a historical reference, Cook. You know, the kind of stuff that is in those history books that you think are all obsoleted by marxism.
If billions are being spent with no idea where they are going, and we are trillions in debt, and have a deficit in the trillions. So you know what? We should probably get a handle on exactly where this money is going.
But according to our socialist friend here, who wants the government to solve every problem, it doesn't matter at all if a huge percentage of that money is going to fraud. You run on that the next election.
"Rummaging through your personal shit is *not* that."
Didn't the Democrats want to hire 87,000 IRS agents? You know- to rummage through your personal shit?
Whatever happened to "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"?
These are extraordinary claims.
All your 9 years olds are belong to us?
That’s too many, isn’t it. I don’t understand it.
“Are these dead people voting?“
9 years old vote? I you can collect SS you might as well vote too.why not?
Let's get some perspective: Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft combined *OWN* - not just have, OWN! - order of magnitude's more personal stuff on more Americans than the U.S. Government. I don't see the Democrats raising a hue and cry about that. In contrast, by comparison, the SS database is boring, boring, boring.
Facebook = META, of course.
This makes USAID look like a lemonade stand.
Are these dead people voting?
Can you possibly doubt it? And 125 miles away in Chi-raq they vote more than once per election, too.
I remember reading that a lot of the DOB entries are mistakenly something like 1/1/1900. That's sloppy and should be easily remedied, but not necessarily nefarious. I know that when my father passes (at almost 99) in 2020, the SS payments stopped immediately. I don't remember whether I had to inform them or if it somehow happened automatically.
"These are extraordinary claims."
Glad you admit it; time will tell.
The absurdity- Democrats are protesting and campaigning as pro-fraud…
This reminds me of how "signature verification" in GA and AZ went from making sure it was a match, to verifying that there was a squiggle in the box.
Ann Althouse at 4:17 asks "Are these dead people voting?" The answer is "early and often".
Even if not nefarious, it at least shows that the USG doesn't do even the most basic maintenance, such as data scrubbing, of key repositories. How hard was it to write the report that spat out the numbers Musk showed? Apparently, either they didn't have such a report, or they did but nobody cared about the bad data, or they saw the bad data and didn't want to do the work of cleaning it up. In any event, that reeks of old-school antiquated systems and processes, and IT mismanagement.
We appear to have recapitulated the Ancien Régime of pre-revolutionary France, don't we? Society in those days was organized around the concept that the masses of working people were created by God for the sole purpose of supporting the nobility and aristocracy and armies of government functionaries, who lived lived under an entirely different set of rules than the rest.
How does that differ from politicized government officials and their well-connected NGO cronies using taxpayer dollars to import illegal invaders to replace us, financially support campaigns to strip us of our Constitutional rights like free speech and the right to bear arms, and draw 7-figure salaries while doing so?
There's a meme my son posted on Instagram showing a blindfolded man in an easy chair, captioned "Government looking at billions of dollars wasted by USAID", then in the next panel his gigantic eyeball is seen peering through a magnifying glass and captioned "Government looking at my $640 Venmo transaction for shit I sold on Ebay".
Let's all resolve that come hell or high water, we back Trump and push through with the job of inflicting apocalyptic damage on the monster occupation government.
Talk to your neighbors and explain it to your kids. Government is our worst enemy. Most (but not all) of the people who work for it are lazy, dishonest, untrustworthy petty tyrants who are stealing from us to finance our own oppression. If we mean to keep our freedom and prosperity, we must destroy government as it currently exists.
I saw this comment somewhere, so it's stolen goods, but here goes:
"The emperor not only has no clothes, but his skin is covered with boils."
"actual experts "
Robert Reich?
Cookie, that Jedi mind trick attempt isn't going to work. Those ARE the droids we are looking for!
Okay, as an IT guy who has worked with guys who worked in the salt mines of the SSA, I can shed some light on where the problems lie.
The software applications that disburse SS payments are ancient in IT terms. Many parts are now 45+ years old code. The applications run on IBM mainframes because at the time they were written, only something of that class could handle the throughput.
Much of the code is COBOL/CICS. COBOL was one of the first computer languages designed for general business use and CICS is (was) the back-end transaction processing service/operating system**. The data records are not in a standard SQL database like IBM's DB2 or Oracle, they are VSAM*** indexed records.
The guys who wrote these apps are either long-retired or dead. Almost no one younger than 55 has any experience with this sort of development environment. Trust me when I tell you no one at Google even knows how to spell "COBOL/CICS".
These systems desperately need to be modernized, but to do so would require a complete up from the ground re-write. And then would come extensive testing, and then a politically fraught move to production. Imagine what hay the political opposition would make of hundreds of poor oldsters disenfranchised of their monthly payment by a software bug! Why not only is the administration heartless, but they're incompetent, too!
So, no one has ever tackled the problem and it continues to fester. Good luck to any administration who steps up to the plate to fix this festering problem.
** I can't embed hot links anymore in comments, apparently, so here's the link for CICS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CICS.
*** VSAM link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Storage_Access_Method
"Apparently, either they didn't have such a report, or they did but nobody cared about the bad data, or they saw the bad data and didn't want to do the work of cleaning it up. In any event, that reeks of old-school antiquated systems and processes, and IT mismanagement."
And just pointing this out is making the left howl.
Nothing a 150 year old man resents more than someone rummaging through his personal shit. Republicans will pay at the voting booth!
With all of these stories, I doubt it's as bad as it's being portrayed. This is all fresh meat for the arena, and the crowd has an appetite, is thirsty for blood. More than likely, it's a legacy of slackers that has been a little lazy about data entry, audit, and reconciliation. I'm glad to see the excitement about reducing wasteful behaviors, and thrilled to see the unwarranted gravy train drying up. While SS is imperfect, I'm betting it's just a messy, antiquated, poorly run bureaucracy that is desperate for modernization. The fraud is probably less than 10%, and the improper administration is probably another 5%.
"I know that when my father passes (at almost 99) in 2020, the SS payments stopped immediately. I don't remember whether I had to inform them or if it somehow happened automatically."
After my father passed away a couple of hours before the end of the month, the government tried to get his SS payment for that month back. Because, you know, he wasn't alive for the entire month.
"The fraud is probably less than 10%, and the improper administration is probably another 5%."
According to Grok, the US paid out $1.5 trillion in SS benefits last year. Fifteen percent (+/-) of that would be a fair amount of money.
As YoungHegelian says above the problem is that the 18–21-year-old geniuses don't know how to read COBOL and are misinterpreting the age field and instead of getting someone to explain to them what it means, are just running with interpretations that give them headlines.
People need to be careful since this is obviously not a payment file. If it were people <65 would be overwhelmingly filtered out (disability and orphans remain). So this database has to be married up to a PAY file and maybe an adjustment file. While all of this needs to be checked it isn't going to be the case that everyone erroneously listed is actually getting paid.
So, no one has ever tackled the problem and it continues to fester.
Ditto the air traffic control system which is at about the level of Pong.
"As long as they meet the qualifications for the job they're doing, why does their age matter?"
How do we know if they meet the qualification for the job? We don't even really what the job entails, so we certainly don't know what the qualifications are, or whether his boy gang possess those qualifications? We don't know who they are and what their backgrounds are or what experience they have. How do we know how they're doing their audits? They're dashing in from one department to another after another, willy nilly, and making seemingly immediate judgements as to what the problems are and what the solutions should be.
There is no way any of these audits can be done at all, much less thoroughly and comprehensively--and then analyzed to determine effective steps for improvement, (if any are warranted)--in these blazing mere days or weeks in which everything is taking place. It's a gigantic fraud on the public by the current administration.
"According to Grok, the US paid out $1.5 trillion in SS benefits last year."
So, let me get this right. You are using an AI by Musk's pwn company to pretend fact check him? Thats like using Maureen Dowd to fact check the New York Times.
Quayle mentioned the contractors. Tonight Dagen reported that over 4 million people have high security clearances in the U.S., many many contractors. Blue states just won't examine/verify voter rolls. Sloppy is as sloppy does.
Musk tweeting about it.🤥
If anything this shows how easy disinformation spreads and how quickly it takes hold, and how poorly the average American understands basic budgetary information.
One thing Musk and his fellow travelers could do when they have questions about social security number holders who are age 100 or older is to look up the SSA Inspector General audit report, "Numberholders Age 100 or Older Who Did Not Have Death Information on the Numident."
https://oig.ssa.gov/assets/uploads/a-06-21-51022.pdf
It's a gripping tale about database hygiene.
It helps explain why (one of the) social security databases contains dead people. (They died before the use of electronic death records.)
And that in turns explains why the database appears to contain an inordinately large number of very old people (whose deaths haven't been recorded).
But existing on a database is different than getting a social security payment. 98% of these individuals receive no payments.
Should government databases be cleaner? It's a cost-benefit question.
Cost: $5-10m to clean out the old records
Benefit: Only "limited benefit" because "almost none" of these records are receiving payments.
This hardly feels like big potatoes, either way.
These DOGE dummies act like they're auditing and anyone with a lick of sense knows that's not what is happening.
But DOGE gotta DOGE.
F.U.B.A.R. is good enough for Mark and Cookie.
I had that on my bingo card.
Mason G said...
"The fraud is probably less than 10%, and the improper administration is probably another 5%."
According to Grok, the US paid out $1.5 trillion in SS benefits last year. Fifteen percent (+/-) of that would be a fair amount of money.
$225 billion a year, hardly worth mentioning. It’d be so much easier to ignore this trivial amount of money and just raise taxes, right Democrats?
“Whatever happened to "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"?
These are extraordinary claims.”
Extraordinary acts of treason or sedition should require extraordinary retribution.
“In most countries around the world, there would be thousands of backs up against various walls for that scale of corruption and outright theft.”
It's well worth $10 million to clean up a DB controlling the payment of trillions. It's worth $100 million. "Limited benefit" assumes that all the of ins and outs of this complex DB are fully understood by those responsible to keep the payments on the up and up.
^^ Based on Musk's behavior on Twitter, he really is very gullible. He suffers the same malady as all Conspiracy Theorists -- the belief that they have discovered what everyone else has overlooked...🤣
I'm a person who can still read and write COBOL code. I'm also a person who was an internal IT auditor for several banks.
A true audit produces work-papers that document what was audited and how. The auditor in charge reviews the work-papers and when necessary, writes a findings memo. All findings must be supported by the work-papers.
The DOGE guys are skipping two important steps: creating the work-papers and writing the findings memo. This really hurts the cause. Proper discipline must be observed.
THe Democrat don't want internal controls over SS numbers, they don't want the rolls cleaned up or audited. For the same reason they dont want the election voter rolls audited or cleaned up.
Having a lot of SS numbers allocated to dead or non-existant people means they can be used not just for fraudulent $$ purposes, but also can be used by illegal aliens.
If I might weigh in here. I retired almost a decade ago, and the last quarter century of my career was spend working for a large defense contractor. Towards the end of that career I was part of a senior team that met with the technical leadership of the Social Security Administration to explore ways we might be able to use our software development expertise to help their agency.
Three of the things we knew going in were (1) they did not (and to my knowledge still do not take advantage of 21st century large database technology -- they use 1960s-type file systems. (2) They use COBOL programs. And (3) new initiatives from Congress forced SSA to modify, test, and debug old COBOL that was increasingly brittle at the same time that COBOL programmers were increasingly hard to find.
When we got there we discovered a bunch of other things. First of all, the people who run the systems at SSA are a proud bunch. They are keenly aware that to many -- probably most -- of the people in the United States they are the federal government, and that check had better be there in the mailbox (deposited via EFT to the citizens' bank accounts) in the right amount and on time or a Congress critter will call someone important in the agency and there will be Hell to pay.
Secondly, the SSA has tried many times to upgrade their systems with modern software and modern database technology, and all of it has blown up in everybody's faces. I recognize the skill level that Musk's crew are bringing to the table, but if they ask me (and they won't) they'd be better off planning to rewrite all the software from scratch and run a shadow system for at least three months to make sure there are no glitches or bugs. Don't try to fix it. I realize -- I've had first hand experience with -- the level of arrogance that the best and the brightest from Silicon Valley (and Redmond, Washington) bring with them, but some pretty damned good people have had at the sort of problems Elon Musk is highlighting, and IMHO solving them won't be as easy as he thinks.
Musk and his team have identified the problem, now someone needs to go in and cleanup the data bases. And establish strong internal controls.
@YoungHegelian, I started writing my "War and Peace" comment after you posted yours. I think we reinforce each other, but I'd add that the folks I met in the SSA technology leadership are not sticking with VSAM and COBOL/CICS out of love for that ancient technology, but because time and again SSA has been badly burned by folks swaggering in from outside convinced that they could upgrade and modernize those ancient systems -- only to fail spectacularly (and bring down careers in SSA with them).
"How do we know if they meet the qualification for the job?"
The fact they appear to be performing to the satisfaction of their supervisor(s) and have not been fired would be the first clue.
"How do we know how they're doing their audits? They're dashing in from one department to another after another, willy nilly..."
You understand that these two sentences aren't in agreement, right? If you don't know how they're doing audits, how can you say they're doing it willy nilly?
Kak, that really gullible conspiracy theorist guy exposed the USAID scam. Last week. Remember?
Is he the gullible one? Or the rest of us, who assumed there was some political shenanigans going on, but had no idea of the size, extent or specifics of the grift.
Go ahead, defend USAID.
(Same guy who is by far the richest man in the world).
More horrific news for the New Soviet Democraticals:
"The Treasury Access Symbol (TAS) is an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item (standard financial process).
In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often left blank, making traceability almost impossible. As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going. Thanks to @USTreasury for the great work." @DOGE
What a nightmare. An absolute travesty. Hitler-esque no doubt.
The left ALWAYS does pushback. No matter what. No matter how correct the non-leftist is.
The Right needs to learn from their methods.
The leftist position: WE need to audit the auditors. And investigate the investigators. because they aren't Leftists.
Darkisland (John Henry), appears you're a resident of Puerto Rico? If so (even if not), are you aware of a fellow Puerto Rican posting on Substack? He's a go to writer for succinctly accurate commentary. https://boriquagato.substack.com/
I guarantee you that there are quite a few tech corps that actually produce extremely complex things - life and death things - that could architect, re-build/export and test the SSA and Treasury databases in the blink of an eye relative to our government. You just have to have the incentive - the rest is just work. I worked in one of those tech corps - we had to migrate/upgrade fairly often in order to execute designs to spec and on time. The problem is the government has no competition. Until now.
@Big Mike,
time and again SSA has been badly burned by folks swaggering in from outside convinced that they could upgrade and modernize those ancient systems -- only to fail spectacularly (and bring down careers in SSA with them).
Oh, yes, I most certainly agree. The history of software development failures by the Federal government is long and appalling. Folks on the outside of the industry don't realize just what a hit or miss enterprise the development of large & complex software systems is. And it's often all or nothing. You either cover 100% of the requirements or your efforts are worthless, and you've got a client who has spent millions of dollars and years of time for nothing.
But, one day, those systems will have to be re-written. The question is when and by who. Maybe, just maybe, AI will be able to come to our aid when elbow grease, luck & pluck, CASE, and "re-usable modules" have all failed. We can only hope.
Those of who've seen federal database systems know very well that they tend to be poorly designed, are often not cleaned or updated, are accessed with ancient software that's confusing and barely works, and that systems don't talk to one another. The recent story of sending paper retirement records down the elevator to be hand processed in a mine is...par for the course.
Modern IT could easily eliminate the majority of federal jobs, as current work requires a mix between high-skill, high-knowledge patch-up work and simple redundancy. Some workers do the best they can with what they have, others just accept their tools as received reality and don't know how very bad these systems are.
This state of affairs follows from who seeks federal employment and the fact that pro-government people (i.e., most federal employees) have positive feelings toward agencies, managers, and program goals. Innovators and boat-rockers tend to not be interested in thorny, self-protective bureaucracies. The politicians have a cartoonish "make it so" attitude to the hard details of implementation, and therefore IT is the last priority when it should be the first priority.
It follows that whatever data Musk is showing, it's not a tabulation of individuals actually receiving benefits.
The broader point is that databases are easy to (willfully?) misinterpret. Representing these numbers as evidence of fraud is dishonest.
Fraud = financial gain, and so requires data on "recipients" not "database entries."
Nearly half of Elon's entries aren't recipients.
You don't need to be a coder to figure this out. Simply type: tab age.
You'll discover a smattering of 99 year olds, a few 100 year olds, a couple of 101 year olds, and a pileup of 150 year olds, but no-one in their 130s or 140s. That's a clear sign you've discovered a coding issue rather than fraud.
As YoungHegelian remarked above -- It looks like Elon’s genius coders don’t know how COBOL works.
Social security runs on COBOL, which does not use a date or time type. So the date is stored as a number using the ISO 8601 standard. The epoch for this is 150 years ago (1875) - aka the metre standard.
So if you don’t know the date of something, it will be a 0 value, which in COBOL will default to 1875 - 150 years ago.
This isn't high tech data science.
Looking at a histogram is literally the first thing you're meant to do when looking at a new dataset. They teach it in high school.
Confirmation bias is a helluva drug, why check when you know you’re right and the only smartest boy in all of America?
"Proper discipline must be observed."
I agree. Where are the work-papers and findings written by Treasury auditors? They should be able to clear this up immediately.
Rupar...er..LLR-democratical Rich: "Social security runs on COBOL, which does not use a date or time type. So the date is stored as a number using the ISO 8601 standard. The epoch for this is 150 years ago (1875) - aka the metre standard.
So if you don’t know the date of something, it will be a 0 value, which in COBOL will default to 1875 - 150 years ago."
LOL
Nope.
There is no automatic default to 1875 in COBOL for missing or zero dates. COBOL dates are usually numeric fields and use custom logic. COBOL does not default to 1875 is false and if its happening here it was a conscious choice by someone and has added to a crappy coded legacy system the "experts" implemented.
This should have been entirely addressed for Y2K...by the "experts". But it wasn't.
I wonder why?...(spoiler: no I dont)
How many ancient "mainframes" does this stuff run on?
Dont worry, we'll get the answers, all of them, soon enough...which is why Abacus Boy Rich is weeping and gnashing his teeth.
And we haven't even addressed how current ML enabled systems can read all COBOL/Fortran codes, irregular characters, images and text.
So its not going to difficult to get to heart of what is going on here.
Building a replacement system and letting it run fully in parallel with the legacy systems for a year or even 2 for troubleshooting (both ways) is not going to be a bridge too far.
Thanks for playing kamala-fanboy Rich! Its always a pleasure.
Nearing 50 years ago, I got on the Civil Service register as a (potential) GS-7 programmer. I was told that I had three chances, and if I didn’t take one of them. First one was a COBOL job with the SSA. I was ordered to show up in DC in under a week. Frantic call, and declined, since moving across the country that quickly was ridiculous. Second one was a FORTRAN job with the Decennial Census Division at Census. Much better fit, and I didn’t have to use COBOL, which I already detested. Maybe 4 years later the Systems Software branch tried to hire me, but that was squelched by our Deputy Director, holding me until 1982. That branch chief mentioned me to a friend, working for a computer company, which hired me to do systems software work. First post there was with NOAA, in the same building, and they too were a COBOL shop. Whoops! Almost. I got to do most of my work in assembler, and just interface with COBOL. No surprise, the COBOL code I saw was atrocious, written by incompetent clowns. It was their payroll system.
But that reminds me of dealing with the IRS. Ever notice that some of the stuff you get from the IRS has nice logos and looks modern, and other stuff is just monospaced text, looking like it came out of the 1980s, or even 1960s? That’s because it was. It was written for, or ported to, long obsolete IBM AS/400 minicomputers, and was, when I discovered this some 5 years ago, emulated on modern IBM machines. Every decade or so, the IRS gets many $billion$ to update their primary systems. The projects fail, and they continue to run their ancient legacy systems through AS/400 emulation software.
You know who else probably wanted to audit the governments books when he came into power?
Hitler.
And he used Weaponized Free Speech to do it no doubt.
That's why it is WRONG to conduct govt audits and have free speech.
Democracy Dies In Free Speech And Govt Audits!
Wow, man, Social Security is like really weird? Nobody knows how it works!
I love a guy with no subject matter knowledge taking an axe to my retirement income.
“Building a replacement system and letting it run fully in parallel with the legacy systems for a year or even 2 for troubleshooting (both ways) is not going to be a bridge too far.”
Except, as I just noted, the IRS has been trying to do just that, for decades. 40-50 year old code still in operation today, running emulated on modern hardware and probably tens of $billions$ spent repeatedly trying to update it over the decades.
Much of the USG COBOL code I saw in the late 1970s and early 1980s was atrocious. Structured coding was just being implemented. And COBOL was even worse than FORTRAN for implementing it. Modularization was prohibitively onerous, so thousands of lines of code in a single module was the standard. COBOL had several flow control mechanisms seemingly implemented for frustrating proof reading the code.
So, for example, you might have a statement “[label]. GO TO X”: But then, you have a statement elsewhere that says “ASSIGN [label] GO TO Y”. Is control of the program going to X or Y at that point? Maybe there is an ASSIGN TO Z elsewhere. Yes, I have seen programs utilizing this construct. And others seemingly designed to hide control flow. Moreover variable scoping is global, and has to be localized through programming standards.
Lest anyone believe that this is just a COBOL problem, the East Anglia University CRU database code was apparently written in FORTRAN, with similar results. Buggy as heck, unreadable, unreliable, unfixable, and unreplaceable. They tried. Mostly written by Climate Scientists, with little software training. And at the time of ClimateGate, the other 4 global climate database sets (including 2 satellite sets) were being calibrated and adjusted to agree with the CRU databases.
So, no one has ever tackled the problem and it continues to fester.
Ditto the air traffic control system which is at about the level of Pong.
The air traffic control system has been tackled with great enthusiasm and rivers of funding several times. The FAA embarked on the infamous AAS program in 1981 and abandoned it in 1994, after blowing nearly 4 billion dollars without producing a single functional program or system that air traffic controllers could use. The fiasco is still taught in colleges of business and computer science as an example of runaway software projects that fail spectacularly.
The current NextGen program has had more success replacing bits and pieces of the ATC system but is still a typical government program, way late and wildly over budget. It began in 2007 and is supposed to wind up in 2030. They have already spent $14 billion on it, and the final cost is projected to be $35 billion, almost twice what was projected in 2007. Despite the hemorrhaging costs, it is far less than half done.
“No, 150-Year-Olds Aren't Collecting Social Security Benefits” (Wired). It’s a quirk of using COBOL, we’re told.
Wired is full of shit.
1: The "epoch" is in May 0f 1875, so people without birthdates would be 149, not 150
2: There's nothing about Cobol that explains the local maxima at 130-139.
3: If the issue was just "accounts without birthdates", there wouldn't be millions of accounts with ages 100 - 139, and there wouldn't be more than a million more age 150 - 369
4: Social Security is given out based on your age. No one should be getting $$$ without an age.
But, I repeat: Wired is full of shit
Ann Althouse said...
Are these dead people voting?
Sadly, that's a good question.
I must confess, I can't imagine why someone who's willing to steal $$$ from Social Security, wouldn't also be willing to send in a absentee ballot for dead great grandmother, too.
SO I expect that yes, some of them are.
Note: The fact that they're in there w/o a "dead" entry does not prove they are still getting paid. That's part of the whole crappy setup, it's clearly not easy to figure that out.
But I expect the Doge team will figure that out, sooner or later, depending on how many Democrat "judges" hit them with TROs, and how long they take to nuke
Mark said...
Whatever happened to "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"?
These are extraordinary claims.
Well, moron, the evidence that the DB holds records with those characteristics comes from teh DB itself. So unless you're going to make the "extraordinary claim" that Musk if flat out knowingly lying about what's in teh DB, that's done.
The next question is "how many of those accounts are getting paid?"
That's a more challenging question, esp. since you Dems are fighting tooth and nail to deny Doge access to the Treasury data systems that would let Musk figure that out.
So, you can either:
1: Agree that every single one of those accounts re proof of fraud, or
2: GTFO of the way so Doge / Musk can get access to the Treasury systems and figure that out.
Pick one
“There is no automatic default to 1875 in COBOL for missing or zero dates. COBOL dates are usually numeric fields and use custom logic. COBOL does not default to 1875 is false and if it’s happening here it was a conscious choice by someone and has added to a crappy coded legacy system the "experts" implemented.”
This is exactly correct. Back 40-50 years ago, disk and memory storage were precious resources. So, storage was economized by squeezing dates into fewer digits, or even byte(s). One way to do that was to just use the lowest order two digits - hence the Y2K problem. SSA couldn’t do that, because at the time they were originally coding this, they had recipients born in the 1800s. So, they settled on 1885 as about the oldest birthdate that they would encounter at that time, then biased the date whenever they retrieved the date from storage, and rebiased it on the way back. It’s now 45-50 years later, and zero valued birthdates now show up as 150 years old. And no doubt, in some obsolete documentation this is documented.
Bruce Hayden: "Except, as I just noted, the IRS has been trying to do just that, for decades."
Yes. The same people with the same skillsets working for the same IRS with the same leadership and same worldview.
Time for something new, or we just hand it back to the "experts" who have run it for 50 years. Those are just the sort of gamechangers we've been looking for!
Oh Yea said...
As YoungHegelian says above the problem is that the 18–21-year-old geniuses don't know how to read COBOL and are misinterpreting the age field
No, the problem is you left wing dirtbags are desperate to cover up all fraud and waste, so you make up bullshit stories that even a minute's thought would tell you are crap.
Wild Chicken: "I love a guy with no subject matter knowledge taking an axe to my retirement income."
How much of your retirement income has been axed?
Don't hold back now! I am certain your tale of woe is most compelling. Have you sought legal counsel yet to go after the $200 or so the richest guy in the world stole from you? Have you contacted Jamie Raskin and his High-minded Team of Retiree Payment Protectors? Will you be testifying before Congress.
Related: Did Brett Kavanaugh rape you too?
"That's a more challenging question, esp. since you Dems are fighting tooth and nail to deny Doge access to the Treasury data systems that would let Musk figure that out."
A lot like what happens when the subject of auditing a vote comes up.
“ The air traffic control system has been tackled with great enthusiasm and rivers of funding several times. The FAA embarked on the infamous AAS program in 1981 and abandoned it in 1994, after blowing nearly 4 billion dollars without producing a single functional program or system that air traffic controllers could use.”
Shared an office with a former ATC controller, during the mid 1980s. He had a CS degree, then flew A6s in the Navy after ROTC. Great fun, except that his second tour at sea would have been non-flying - doing ATC work, that had been his secondary training. So he got out instead, just in time for Reagan to fire all of the union controllers. So, he went to work for the FAA as an ATC. Eventually took his preference points and jumped back to Fort Collins, where he had grown up, into a CS job. He used to swear about how bad the software he had to work with was, and laughed at that upgrade program.
One funny anecdote from sharing that office with him - every morning, he would call WWV in Boulder, and we would sync our watches. We needed built in modems to do that by computers, so that’s what the operators would also whenever they booted one of the mainframes. I became obsessive enough about this that I was able to obtain software to do this, I downloaded it and ran it automatically on my PCs whenever they were rebooted.
Kakistocracy said...
Musk tweeting about it.
If anything this shows how easy disinformation spreads and how quickly it takes hold, and how poorly the average American understands basic budgetary information.
You're telling on yourself here.
Kakistocracy said...
One thing Musk and his fellow travelers could do when they have questions about social security number holders who are age 100 or older is to look up the SSA Inspector General audit report, "Numberholders Age 100 or Older Who Did Not Have Death Information on the Numident."
...
But existing on a database is different than getting a social security payment. 98% of these individuals receive no payments.
THere's ~24 million records age > 100 and "not dead". So 2% of those is half a million people.
I asked Siri, and she said there are 72,000 documented American living Centenarians.
So that's 7x as many :getting paid" records as "actually alive" records, or over 400,000.
All of them draining the Social Security trust fund.
400,000 felonies, all being ignored.
But do keep on doing your "Kevin Bacon in Animal House" impersonation.
Kakistocracy said...
Should government databases be cleaner? It's a cost-benefit question.
Cost: $5-10m to clean out the old records
Benefit: Only "limited benefit" because "almost none" of these records are receiving payments.
So you suck at math. Because 400k * $20k/year = $8 BILLION / year
This hardly feels like big potatoes, either way.
These DOGE dummies act like they're auditing and anyone with a lick of sense knows that's not what is happening.
But DOGE gotta DOGE.
You mean leftist dirtbags have to leftist dirtbag
I'm not quite following the explanations about the database because even in fairly young age ranges the difference between the SS database and the US population is quite large. For example, the SS database says there are 47.9 million people in the 20 to 29 age range whereas US population data say there are 44.9 million, a difference of 3 million.
But it gets really strange if you look at the number of people receiving Social Security in the US compared to the number there are in the 65 on age range. There are 72.9 people receiving SS benefits; there are 54.7 people 65 or older in the US. So that seems like a gap so that's what I can't understand. The SS database shows 77 million people age 65 to 99 so in that database the gap doesn't exist. but that database has millions of people over 100 so that seems to me unreliable. So I don't get it.
Still, it seems clear that it would be hard to audit using that unreliable SS database so I think the Doge Boys have shown a need.
And also I wonder if the projected depletion of SS is based on this unreliable SS database.
But perhaps i've misunderstood something or added wrong. I was 25 a long time ago.
Here's what I used as sources for population numbers in the comment above on the difficulties I am experiencing in understanding the SS numbers.
US population by age
https://www.neilsberg.com/insights/united-states-population-by-age/
SS Database in Elan Musk tweet
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1891350795452654076
How many people are on Social Security?
"Including results for How many people are on Social security
Assist
As of December 2024, approximately 72.9 million people were receiving Social Security benefits, including Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients. This number reflects a combination of various beneficiary types, including retired workers, disabled individuals, and their dependents.
urban.org
Social Security Administration
Auto-generated based on listed sources. May contain inaccuracies."
Isn't it funny, that almost everything Kak and his ilk have called "conspiracy theories" have turned out to be RIGHT??
Kakistocracy said...
^^ Based on Musk's behavior on Twitter, he really is very gullible. He suffers the same malady as all Conspiracy Theorists -- the belief that they have discovered what everyone else has overlooked...🤣
I STILL want to know how Hussein Obama got a Connecticut Social Security number that belonged to someone else. Where DID he steal it, and WHY??
While there is certainly the possibility of fraud going on here, I'm more inclined to apply the 'never assume malice when incompetence is more likely' standard. These are people who got a Social Security number but aren't marked as dead (as I understand the list). The first Social Security numbers were issued in 1936. There certainly wouldn't have been any automation in the system to identify deaths for years after that, and especially not for people who weren't receiving benefits. Social Security benefits were far from universal for years. Self-employed people weren't covered until the mid-1950s, various government retirement systems ran in parallel, and even now railroad workers can still choose between Social Security and the Railroad Retirement system. None of that would have stopped those people from applying for numbers, especially as your SSN became a de facto universal id number and tied in with income taxes. There were, as best I can google, about 60 million people ages 20 to 40 in 1940. I'm not at all surprised a few million of them were never recorded as dead in the SSA system.
20+ years working in COBOL/VSAM here, retired for 10+. Very good comments from our IT commenter updates so far. Everything you have heard is also true of your mortgage - my employer processes about half of US mortgages via COBOL/VSAM and all attempts to replace this have collapsed in a burning heap, unless something has happened in the last ten years I don't know about. The only thing I can gather from all this is that Musk and his boffins, and we, are operating with incomplete knowledge that will have to be explained before this is all over. I await the findings.
Aggie said...
With all of these stories, I doubt it's as bad as it's being portrayed.
Having been there, Aggie, I assure you that it’s worse than you can even comprehend.
It’s actually quite hard to determine for sure if the person you are paying a pension or annuity for life is still living. The last known address and phone number you have may be useless as the person may have moved into the home of a friend or relative, assisted living, or a nursing home, or they may be dead.
In fact, the private sector looks to death data the Social Security Administration collects. Even if they still have their old address or phone number, they may not answer your correspondence or phone call.
If Musk were serious about addressing this, he would put together a properly vetted team to research a sample of the types of social security records he finds suspicious to determine the fraud rate, the data entry error rate, etc. That might take 3 to 6 to 12 months. Instead, he is not even telling us what percentage of these suspicious accounts are currently receiving benefits, not a good indicator that he is serious.
@wildswan: There are 72.9 people receiving SS benefits; there are 54.7 people 65 or older in the US. So that seems like a gap so that's what I can't understand.
You answered your question in your very next post:
This number reflects a combination of various beneficiary types, including retired workers, disabled individuals, and their dependents.
Not everyone receiving Social Security payouts is retired or over 62.
"'How do we know if they meet the qualification for the job?'
"The fact they appear to be performing to the satisfaction of their supervisor(s) and have not been fired would be the first clue."
How do we know who their supervisors are, and what their qualifications are? How do we know what the goal is? If Musk has gone in their with predetermined expectations and a predetermined goal--as I'm sure is the case--how can we know they're not simply looking for that which will support their goal, while ignoring that which might invalidate it?
The whole fraud of DOGGIE's actions are that we, the people, do not know anything about them, what they're doing, or what they've been tasked to do. Their entire mission statement might just be: "Search for only that information that will justify our wholesale gutting of the personnel and functioning of this department."
NO changes in ANY department should be made until Congress has carefully reviewed ALL the audit reports. The audits data and findings and recommended changes should be made available directly to the public.
Do we know more about who the usual faceless bureaucrats are, what they are doing, and what they really consider their task to be? I'd say the problem with DOGE is too much transparency. Things are released or leak out before a full report can be compiled and if what gets out doesn't show the whole picture, it will reflect badly on DOGE.
Ann Althouse said...
"Are these dead people voting?"
Ah. As you know I'm from Chicago. Not only are they voting, they are voting in more than one precinct.
Now we know without a doubt that nearly all of our "usual suspects" are federal employees.
I hope, and I mean this sincerely, That all of you are looking for work in the next several months.
I'd like to know when the Treasury Access Symbol (TAS, an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item) became optional. I'm assuming it was "required" at one time, otherwise why allocate 'precious' storage for it.
If TAS was required and then changed to be optional, why and by whom was it changed? Kind of a proof of concept positive?
Left Bank of the Charles said...
If Musk were serious about addressing this, he would put together a properly vetted team to research a sample of the types of social security records he finds suspicious to determine the fraud rate, the data entry error rate, etc. That might take 3 to 6 to 12 months. Instead, he is not even telling us what percentage of these suspicious accounts are currently receiving benefits, not a good indicator that he is serious.
Really, Leftie? You just haven't been paying attention at all?
Because it's been mentioned many times that the SS system isn't set up to easily get information out of it.
So I'm sure that finding out which of those accounts are getting paid is on Musk's to do list. Of course, the left wing lawsuits trying to block Doge access to Treasury information makes that more difficult.
Have I just missed the places where you attacked the Left / Dems for suing to block Doge access to information?
Robert Cook @ 10:33- "NO changes in ANY department should be made until Congress has carefully reviewed ALL the audit reports. The audits data and findings and recommended changes should be made available directly to the public." This is a statement that every bureaucrat will love. Mr. Trump is a disruptor, and I believe our country will ultimately benefit from the actions he's taking.
>>The fraud is probably less than 10%, and the improper administration is probably another 5%.
All of us here at The Department of Pulling Numbers Out of Our Ass resent your attempts to put us out of work.
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