However, when John McKenny, SVP and general manager of mainframe optimization at BMC Software, heard that DOGE planned to replace COBOL at the SSA within months, his reaction was: “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
COBOL replacement projects of this size can cost millions of dollars and take years to complete, says McKenny, who acknowledges he may be biased toward COBOL.
Digital transformation projects at the size of the reported DOGE plans often fail, McKenny adds. “Most CIOs have either direct or arms-length experience with different transformation initiatives and migration initiatives of that scale,” he says. “There are a few companies that have done it at a much, much smaller scale, but at that scale, those who have tried have failed and quietly walked away.”
While COBOL is an old programming language, it continues to be updated and supports a variety of modern development methodologies, McKenny says. It’s an easy programming language to learn, he adds, and it has an ecosystem of dev tools around it.
“You’re re-architecting decades of business logic,” McKenny says. “There’s middleware dependencies, there’s database connections, and when you think about rewriting something this mission-critical, you need really intensive testing.”
“Replacing COBOL systems at the Social Security Administration within a few months is highly ambitious and unrealistic due to the complexity of legacy code built up over decades,” says Frankel, a former COBOL coder. “A rushed rewrite risks introducing critical failures in a system that millions rely on. Social Security is not something to ‘fail fast’ on.”
“If the existing systems meet the business requirements, then I don’t see any issues in continuing to run COBOL at government agencies and organizations at all,” he says. “A rewrite is the last thing one should consider for a system that is running fine.”
For example, if organizations depending on COBOL are worried about retiring developers, they cantrain younger coders on the programming language, and if COBOL developers are using old tools or process, CIOs can update those pieces without replacing an entire code base.
Lambert here: Funny how “learn to code” never applied to COBOL. Instead, wannabe coders were herded into languages that Silicon Valley needed, and then they were all fired in a few years anyhow, during the (ongoing) AI bubble. Good jjob, America.