Elon Musk Secretly Working to Rewrite the Social Security Codebase Using AI

In what feels like another life, Donald Trump ran for presidential election on the promise of "draining the swamp," in a direct appeal to the masses of workers and the poor of the US who knew something wasn't quite right with the status quo. It worked, sparking a nationwide movement backing a man whose immense fortune had been built on union busting, labor exploitation, and government handouts from the poor to the rich — in short, on the backs of the very workers he swore to protect.

Now that Trump is the status quo, those voters are learning once again what a shrewd business man he is. Case in point, his chief lackey Elon Musk is in charge of gutting the federal government and its various social safety programs — and it sounds like he's looking to hand off the gig to the totally stable hands of artificial intelligence.

New reporting by Wired has revealed that Musk's DOGE is putting together a team to totally redo the Social Security Administration's computer systems from COBOL, an old but trustworthy code language undergirding the entire Social Security program. Experts say the process is a major undertaking with some huge risks, which probably explains why it hasn't been done yet — a 2014 report by the SSA noted that the system contains some 60 million lines of code.

The plan is headed by Steve Davis, one of Musk's faithful enforcers, and will apparently encompass migrating the entire system onto a more modern contemporary language within a matter of months.

With that timeframe, the venture is likely to rely on generative AI, a source told Wired — a horrifying prospect given that even the most advanced AI models still struggle to solve the majority of programming tasks. Add to that a team of inexperienced tech bros, and the SSA system responsible for over 65 million payments is poised for disaster.

"DOGE thinks if they can say they got rid of all the COBOL in months, then their way is the right way and we all just suck for not breaking shit," an SSA source told Wired.

It's not just the government that still runs on COBOL. A 2017 Reuters study on the coding language found that COBOL is a major pillar of the US financial industry, making up 43 percent of banking systems. At the time, some 95 percent of ATM transactions depended on COBOL, and software experts still note that 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies actively use it.

If COBOL is so ubiquitous, then why the sudden rush to scrap it all and start fresh when it comes to social security?

On the surface, this definitely falls on Musk's "work fast, break things" ethos, paired with Trump's beloved austerity policies. Indeed, the private equity buzzards are already circling over the SSA. That said, DOGE didn't come up with the idea to gut social spending — that's a time-honored tradition of capitalism's elites — and it certainly isn't the first administration to chip away at Social Security.

What is new is the callous disregard with which this administration is treating the most vulnerable in America, in what basically amounts to a PR campaign for DOGE. An AI-enabled SSA crash might not mean much to the richest man in the history of the world, but the millions of people relying on the already flailing system to dispense retirement funds, disability, and Medicare benefits don't share his luxury.

As Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley pined: "The cruelty is the point."

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