DOGE Now Runs Treasury and OPM
An evil genius controls the key levers of government.

NYT (“Elon Musk’s Team Now Has Access to Treasury’s Payments System“):
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave representatives of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to the federal payment system late on Friday, according to five people familiar with the change, handing Elon Musk and the team he is leading a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.
The new authority follows a standoff this week with a top Treasury official who had resisted allowing Mr. Musk’s lieutenants into the department’s payment system, which sends out money on behalf of the entire federal government. The official, a career civil servant named David Lebryk, was put on leave and then suddenly retired on Friday after the dispute, according to people familiar with his exit.
The system could give the Trump administration another mechanism to attempt to unilaterally restrict disbursement of money approved for specific purposes by Congress, a push that has faced legal roadblocks.
Mr. Musk, who has been given wide latitude by President Trump to find ways to slash government spending, has recently fixated on Treasury’s payment processes, criticizing the department in a social media post on Saturday for not rejecting more payments as fraudulent or improper.
The Musk allies who have been granted access to the payment system were made Treasury employees, passed government background checks and obtained the necessary security clearances, according to two people familiar with the situation, who requested anonymity to discuss internal arrangements. While their access was approved, the Musk representatives have yet to gain operational capabilities and no government payments have been blocked, the people said.
Mr. Musk’s initiative is intended to be part of a broader review of the payments system to allow improper payments to be scrutinized and is not an effort to arbitrarily block individual payments, the people familiar with the matter said. Career Treasury Department attorneys signed off on granting the access, they added, and any changes to the system would go through a review process and testing.
The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is not a government department, but a team within the administration. It was put together at Mr. Trump’s direction by Mr. Musk to fan out across federal agencies seeking ways to cut spending, reduce the size of the federal work force and bring more efficiency to the bureaucracy. Most of those working on the initiative were recruited by Mr. Musk and his aides.
Similar DOGE teams have begun demanding access to data and systems at other federal agencies, but none of those agencies control the flow of money in the way the Treasury Department does.
[…]
Former officials said the onus was on individual agencies to ensure their payments are proper, not the relatively small staff at the Treasury Department, which is responsible for making more than one billion payments per year.
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Democrats raised alarm this week that the Trump administration and Mr. Bessent, who was just confirmed by the Senate this week, were compromising the federal government’s payments system.
“To put it bluntly, these payment systems simply cannot fail, and any politically motivated meddling in them risks severe damage to our country and the economy,” Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote in a letter to Mr. Bessent on Friday. “I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems.”
On Saturday, Mr. Wyden expressed concern that access to the payment system had been granted and pointed out Mr. Musk — a billionaire with a vast portfolio — has potential conflicts of interest.
“Social Security and Medicare benefits, grants, payments to government contractors, including those that compete directly with Musk’s own companies. All of it,” he wrote on social media.
During the transition, Mr. Musk vocally opposed Mr. Bessent being picked as Mr. Trump’s Treasury secretary. Mr. Musk, then just an empowered adviser to Mr. Trump, went public with his opinion that he preferred Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street executive, for the role because Mr. Bessent was “a business-as-usual choice.” Mr. Lutnick became Mr. Trump’s choice for Commerce secretary.
WaPo (“Musk aides gain access to sensitive Treasury Department payment system“) adds:
The sensitive systems, run by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, control the flow of more than $6 trillion annually. Tens of millions of people across the country rely on the systems. They are responsible for paying Social Security and Medicare benefits, salaries for federal personnel, payments to government contractors and grant recipients, and tax refunds, among tens of thousands of other functions.
Typically, only a small group of career employees control the payment systems, and former officials have said it is extremely unusual for anyone connected to political appointees to access them.
The notion that it’s up to Treasury to audit millions of payments directed from every agency in the government is sheer lunacy. That these decisions will now be made by amateurs with clear conflicts of interest is, to say the least, disturbing.
As with so many of the actions taken in the less than two weeks (!) since Trump began his second administration, this will almost certainly be quickly challenged in court. But, even if ultimately reversed, substantial damage will be done in the meantime.
The weird rollout of DOGE made it seem very much like a sophomoric joke. It was a non-department department named after a meme coin for lulz. But the actual implementation has been sheer evil genius.
On literally Day 1, Trump renamed the existing US Digital Service DOGE, with an Administrator in the Executive Office of the President reporting directly to the White House Chief of Staff and essentially authorizing a full takeover of other agencies of government:
Sec. 4. Modernizing Federal Technology and Software to Maximize Efficiency and Productivity. (a) The USDS Administrator shall commence a Software Modernization Initiative to improve the quality and efficiency of government-wide software, network infrastructure, and information technology (IT) systems. Among other things, the USDS Administrator shall work with Agency Heads to promote inter-operability between agency networks and systems, ensure data integrity, and facilitate responsible data collection and synchronization.
(b) Agency Heads shall take all necessary steps, in coordination with the USDS Administrator and to the maximum extent consistent with law, to ensure USDS has full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems. USDS shall adhere to rigorous data protection standards.
(c) This Executive Order displaces all prior executive orders and regulations, insofar as they are subject to direct presidential amendment, that might serve as a barrier to providing USDS access to agency records and systems as described above.
This has directly enabled the shock and awe dismantling of agency leadership that we’ve been documenting the last few days. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick takes stock:
Remember how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter by ripping apart its infrastructure without understanding it? Now imagine that same playbook applied to the federal government. It’s happening, and the stakes are exponentially higher. When reviewing Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s book “Character Limit” last fall, I highlighted two devastating patterns in Musk’s management: his authoritarian impulse to (sometimes literally) demolish systems without understanding them, and his tendency to replace existing, nuanced solutions with far worse alternatives (even when those older systems probably did require some level of reform). Those same patterns are now threatening the federal government’s basic functions.
Let’s be crystal clear about what’s happening: A private citizen with zero Constitutional authority is effectively seizing control of critical government functions. The Constitution explicitly requires Senate confirmation for anyone wielding significant federal power — a requirement Musk has simply ignored as he installs his loyalists throughout the government while demanding access to basically all of the levers of power, and pushing out anyone who stands in his way.
[…]
For all of Musk and fans whining about the hiring of “unqualified” people (which has been very clearly coded to mean non-white, non-male, non-cisgender), the fact that he’s hired a kid whose experience is “camp counselor” into a high-level position is fucking insane.
But this isn’t just about personnel changes. It’s about systematically dismantling government institutions from the inside out.
And it’s only getting more and more dangerous. It’s been reported (and a lawsuit has been filed over it) that the “fork in the road email” was sent via a hastily setup on-premises server that these idiots needed to do the email blast, even though that almost certainly violates federal law.
On top of that, there are multiple reports of Musk basically taking over various parts of the government. He apparently showed up at the General Services Administration on Thursday, just after his right-hand man in the Twitter shakeup, Steve Davis, told them they were ending a bunch of leases on government buildings (another thing that Twitter also did). Even worse, Wired reports that Musk’s friends are using the GSA to try to get access to a variety of systems, including remote access to laptops, and even reading emails of government employees.
[…]
Then, later [Friday], Reuters reported that Musk’s aides have locked career civil servants entirely out of government computer systems.
[…]
Again, Elon has not been nominated as an officer of the US, and the Senate has not even been given the ability to review any such nomination. Instead, he’s basically acting like he runs the government and is slashing and cutting with wild abandon.
There are all sorts of laws that have been broken in the process, forcing courts to jump in. Earlier today, for example, a judge in Rhode Island had to stop the Musk/Trump administration from carrying out their attempt to stop spending money apportioned by Congress.
[…]
While just at the district court level, this judicial smackdown echoes historic rebukes like Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, where SCOTUS reminded Truman that “the President’s power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker.” Musk’s shadow administration represents a constitutional crisis orders of magnitude greater than Twitter’s blue check chaos.
When Elon took over Twitter, he certainly had the right to go in and destroy the place through ignorance and overconfidence.
But this is the US government. He doesn’t own it. He wasn’t elected. He wasn’t officially appointed. And there are laws that are being broken left and right. Even worse, the impact of all this nonsense is way more significant and way more serious than any of the shit he pulled at Twitter.
Millions of people actually depend on the US government functioning. You can’t just have some random jackass show up and rip out fences and assume shit won’t go south. They went completely south with Twitter, but that was just a random social media site people could move on from. This is the most powerful country in the world, and it’s being ripped apart by someone with no concern or care for the actual damage he’s doing.
Henry Farrell adds:
For years, many people in Silicon Valley have been convinced that if only they were in charge, they could eliminate the waste and ideological excesses of government, getting rid of all the obstructionists, and creating a leaner, tighter machine instead.
From this unique perspective, the fact that none of the DOGE people actually understand how government functions is a feature, not a bug. If you understand the workings of the federal bureaucracy you are almost certainly part of the problem, not the solution.
That’s how we end up in a world where a 21 year old and a recent high school graduate seem to have taken effective charge of a crucial engine of government. Unfortunately, “Let’s see what this button does,” worse, “we’ll find out what we need by ripping everything out and seeing what fails,” and worst of all, “government rulemaking is _so_ mid: we’ll have AGI by 2027!” are not viable approaches to reform.
Both Masnick and Farrell are highly sympathetic to the need to reform government processes, which are indeed often archaic. They simply prefer that it be done through legal means by people who know what they’re doing.
Clearly, Musk and company have a plan. The speed and scope with which they’re dismantling core mechanisms of government—the HR, communication, and payment systems among them—is breathtaking and way beyond what I could have imagined.
Now we get to see if our institutions can hold. Rather clearly, a Republican-controlled Congress is not going to intervene. The combination of Trump’s hold over the base and Musk’s money and control of the means of communicating with the public has them afraid for their political future, if not their safety. That means, at least for the next two years, it’s up to the courts.
This is how they get around the court’s squashing of their payments freeze. They just get handed the keys to the Treasury and simply refuse to issue the payments from there.
This is also illegal, but who’s going to stop them now? They are inside, they can just ignore the court and do what they please. Do you think a federal law enforcement apparatus run by Trump appointees is going to march in and remove them?
As Masha Gessen says in rule 3 of “Autocracy: Rules for Survival:” “Institutions will not save you.” We are well and truly fucked.
It’s stunning that in less than two weeks Musk has become everything Conservatives accused George Soros* of being and more.
(* – to be fair, this is also true of progressives and the Koches.)
It’s a good thing that we’re a Federal system, state governments can provide, though at wide variance, some level of stability.
Every time someone claims they are going after waste and fraud they come back with nothing actionable.
The other day these MAGA clowns claimed $500M was going to condoms for Gaza. Proof they are unable to read a spreadsheet.
This will not end well.
@Matt Bernius:
Considering that the Koch’s directly funded the Tea Party, which ultimately led to Trump, I’m not buying the equivilance.
Last time Musk got involved in computer meddling was in Twitter. Twitter’s valuation went from a 50 billion dollars company to one fourth of that after his takeover (and many thousand layoffs), proceeded to lie about what he found (“the Twitter files”), used his platform for his own personal glorification, and proceeded to thwart free speech.
Gosh, yes. Wouldn’t that be lovely? That ship sailed. The “move fast and break things” set are in there now, and it’s going to get very messy very quickly.
@Raoul: Musk is also suing a bunch of companies because they stopped advertising on his platform after he removed all of the guardrails that kept it from being a cesspool. Is there a right to advertising revenue? I hope this case gets tossed out of court.
@Sleeping Dog:..It’s a good thing that we’re a Federal system, state governments can provide, though at wide variance, some level of stability.
Are you kidding?
I live in Illinois. If these goons interfere with my Social Security benefits I have no confidence that the General Assembly in Springfield will immediately deposit funds into my bank account to cover my loss.
“A tyranny, if you can stand it.”
I suspect many of these systems are still COBOL based, highly customized, full of dead code, and that none of Musk’s people would have a clue how they work.
@Scott:
This is a fair suspicion.
The number of devs who know COBOL is tiny, and shrinking quickly.
Sorry, Matt, if you’re relying on the courts, that means America, and the world the American hegemony supported/created (for better or worse) are well and truly effed.
Tripods are stable supports. Monopods? Not so much.
@Kurtz: A lot of them may have been cleaned up and updated during Y2K but that is still 25 years ago.
“KOBAL? Erase it all and rewrite it in Elfish”- Musk, probably
But seriously, what better example of “inefficiency” than critical software that still uses an obsolete language? His devs probably told him they could get a beta version out in 2-3 weeks, since they are all extremely hard core
I had a conversation with a cousin, who works in a government agency. Their computer systems do indeed work on COBOL. There have been several attempts to upgrade them, which have failed under the following scenario.
1. Those systems are tightly interwoven with many other systems in the US Gov, with many, many dependencies on old data formats and protocols, few of which are documented.
2. They have received funding from Congress to address this, but it always takes longer (and costs more) than expected, the funding gets pulled, the vendor pulls out, along with the information and progress they have made so far .
It’s not the employees of this system that make it a problem. It’s that computing is hard, really hard, and matches up badly with how the political part of the system works.
@Jay L Gischer: From a raw engineering-only standpoint, the notion of just go in and start breaking things will get the work done faster. It’s just that we really cannot tolerate the circumstances in this case.
For instance, I endorse the SpaceX methodology. They send up rockets knowing that at some point something isn’t going to work. The point of the launch is to find out, empirically, just what isn’t going to work. I think this is a good idea, since you are only burning your own money on that launch.
And if Musk were a person inclined to be careful, certain system tests and intervention can probably be carried out with little consequence.
Of course, the question remains as to why Musk just wasn’t made Chief of the US Digital Service, which has been manned by some very competent people, at least to start.
Or maybe upgrading the computer systems of the USGov isn’t the point?
@Matt Bernius:
In the absence of any meaningful evidence at all, conservatives have been incredibly successful in depicting George Soros as the political anti-christ that Elon Musk is now showing himself to be.
@Jay L Gischer:
“Of course, the question remains as to why Musk just wasn’t made Chief of the US Digital Service, which has been manned by some very competent people, at least to start.
Or maybe upgrading the computer systems of the USGov isn’t the point?”
Of course not. Would Musk have donated $250M to Trump for that?
@Erik:
In my career, I saw a number of corporate back offices that were running on code initially written in the 60’s and 70’s, that was held together with duct tape and bailing wire. When you’d ask senior IT execs why, it was due to the enormous cost, both in dollars and disruption that was faced.
Since the 60’s the federal government has been run on the cheap and no administration was willing to make a commitment to updating tech that was working. The projects would take years and provide no noticeable benefit to the voters. Beyond the cost and project timeline, add in the clunky Federal procurement process, which is a nightmare to navigate and encourages the agency simply to stick with known, approved vendors.
@Matt Bernius: To be fair, Koch is used as the face of a large network of conservative dark money funders and organizations. The Heritage Foundation, which produced Project 2025, and The Federalist Society, which gifted us the current SCOTUS, are generally regarded as part of the “Kochtopus” network. Mike Pence, who directed staffing for Trump 1.0, was a Koch minion.
@Kurtz: I recall a Dilbert strip from many years ago (I know, Scott Adams, but he filched some funny ideas). From memory:
Dilbert – Frank, you’ve been here even longer than we have. We see you walking around a lot. What do you do here?
Frank – Twenty years ago I wrote the company accounting system, 10,000 lines of undocumented COBOL spaghetti code.
Wally (awestruck) – The Holy Grail of technology.
Frank – I like you guys, look for something a little extra on your pay slips this month.
Do you suppose anyone’s working on an AI that can debug COBOL?
@Jay L Gischer:
If you can get the head of the FAA fired so no one complains too much about the debris. I suspect whoever is responsible for wetlands protection may also be leaving soon.
So, because this is a hobby horse of mine, and it distracts me from the sheer lunacy of what’s happening, some words about COBOL.
I should start by saying I’m biased. I’ve spent the last 25 years working on z/OS, aka one of the three operations systems that underpin the modern financial system. The others are zTPF and zVM. Linux is nice and all, but it’s not built for transaction processing the way the above OSes are. They’re built specifically to handle the needs of really large organizations to the exclusion of everything else.
A lot of what runs on z/OS is COBOL. Also assembler, PL/1, C, java, python, go, etc. But a lot of the really core programs that isn’t assembler and PL/1 is COBOL. And COBOL is pointed to as an example of outdated technology, and it’s responsible for clunkiness, and so on. And that’s simply not true.
People say that the reason things haven’t been modernized is because of COBOL. They can’t find COBOL programmers. The reality is that any competent programmer can learn COBOL. It’s a programming language, and with the exception of some really obscure languages, a programming language is a programming language. They’re all doing basically the same thing, just with different syntax.
What makes programming hard isn’t the language you’re using. It’s understanding the code you’re working on, and all of the surrounding code, and how it all interacts. While more modern techniques have made this (in theory) less important, the code from the 60s, 70s, 80s is all very intertwined, and in order to safely make changes, you need to understand a very large portion of the code base, and the things that the code interacts with. Because that’s the real value in the 50 year old code. There are decades worth of edge case handling, and “that will never happen,” and having to interoperate with a bunch of other systems that are all their own special snowflake. Because every time two banks merge, they almost never merge their IT systems, they just write some glue code to stick them together.
If companies were actually serious about modernizing their COBOL code, they’d be willing to pay to do so. But COBOL programmers make less than python programmers, and data scientists, and so on. The problem is that all of this existing code is seen as infrastructure, and infrastructure isn’t sexy. Just like politicians, no executive gets promoted because their division refactored all of their COBOL code into java, which does the exact same thing. They get promoted for introducing some new system or capability. CICS and Hogan and so on are perfectly capable of presenting a nice, modern UI, but the TN3270 console works just as well, so why pay for someone to redesign it? And then blame COBOL, not a lack of investment.
There’s been a lot of talk over the past twenty years or so about porting COBOL to java, and maybe now to python, but that’s not going to fix the actual problem, which is that nobody wants to invest in infrastructure. They’ve stopped teaching java in most colleges, and I’m guessing in about 10 years, there’s going to be a lot of talk about how there’s a crisis because no one knows how to program in java any more. The problem isn’t the language, the problem is that the people who wrote the code retired, and they didn’t hire anyone to apprentice with them before they retired. And new people don’t want to work on the code because it’s not sexy and won’t get them recognition in the same way adding an LLM to your calculator will, even though nobody actually wants that.
During the pandemic, you had a number of governors begging for help, saying that their unemployment systems couldn’t keep up with the demand, and they desperately needed COBOL programmers. What they actually needed was more processing capacity, as their systems were undersized. Once they got the capacity, the problem went away, and that COBOL code did just fine, thank you. I don’t know this for certain, but I can almost guarantee that someone warned their superior that they were running out of available processing power in the years prior, and they were ignored, because mainframe people actually pay attention to capacity planning.
Anyway, I’m very sure that Musk and team don’t understand the systems, but they’re pulling out the data, not trying to change the code. I’d absolutely love to see Elon try to write JCL, or even an SQL statement. And at some point, I hope those doing this get the prison sentences they so richly deserve.
Any word on the status of the lawsuits pointing out that DOGE is the epitome of an organization that falls under FACA, and is subject to its rules?
@DrDaveT: See https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-legal-challenges-trump-administration-actions/
The problem is that the law takes time. I’m still (slightly) hopeful that someone, maybe from the DC police, is going to start arresting people, as I’m very sure all of this violates actual laws, but once the data is copied, it’s copied.
This is the Uber playbook, where you break the law, but in the time it takes for the law to catch up to you, you’ve also taken the place of things that are needed by society, so the powers that be negotiate with you, and then you can extract rents.
@Kevin: Some of us old-timers still joke about APL, which I’m sure is one of those obscure languages you referred to. A language that required a special keyboard. If I’m remembering correctly, I took a general computing languages class in college that taught it, lisp, SNOBOL (!), AND c++ (also !).
Apropos of nothing, I’m old. I’m so old the first programming language I learned was FORTRAN, with punch cards, running on the Illiac II.
@Kevin: Oh man I’m so glad you made that post so I didn’t have to.
COBOL isn’t some mysterious dead language that no one understands anymore. That talking point is kind of a pet peeve of mine lately.
The other part of the COBOL equation is the interconnectedness with state systems.
A lot of these projects and programs, and therefore the funding and payment systems, are sent to state agencies or have state distribution requirements. States have also struggled to upgrade. It is incredibly complex and messy. Once you start breaking things, it might be impossible to fix them.
It takes a lot to astonish me, but the sheer scale of this…sh!tshow has.
@Kevin: One of the defunct machine tool companies I worked for hired a guy who was, at the time, a heavyweight computer guy. IIRC he’d managed setting up the first company wide database system at one of the aerospace companies. This would, I think, have been in the eighties. He was wrong in his opinion that he had no idea what the dominant language of the future would be, but it would be called FORTRAN. FORTRAN had, at that time, absorbed the functionality of some early languages. His other maxim, which I think has gone by the boards, is his insistence on flow charting before writing the first line of code and documenting the code. As a tech outsider, it seems to me absence of this discipline is a big factor in issues with old code.
FYI, I’m working off frustration, having spent a good chunk of yesterday falling to copy a CD via a Windows PC into Apple Music. All the documentation and advice I found says use iTunes and then sync to Music. So I downloaded and tried to use iTunes, which no longer handles tunes, just podcasts and ebooks. I can’t find any documentation that addresses the current apps. Back at it in a bit. I have an old laptop that has an old version of iTunes. I’ll try that next. If that fails, I’m back to Apple HELP (sic) and other online sources.
@gVOR10:
I thought I recognized you from class. It’s been ages, how’ve you been doing?
No, seriously. Fortran, cobol, and that new-fangled basic back when the smart kids marked the tops of the cards in their shoebox before they went over to the lab to beg the dude running the computer for an off schedule opening. Good times.
@Flat Earth Luddite: One winter I saw a guy walking across the quad (this was Iowa State, not Illinois) carrying one of the card boxes with many hundreds of cards each under each arm. Stepped on an icy patch and went down, flinging out both arms. Me and a dozen others who saw it were chasing windblown cards all over the quad. I hoped he put diagonal stripes on the decks.
@Kevin:
I offer the counter-example of LISP. All of the functional languages, really, but especially LISP.
COBOL is pretty normal, from what I hear. Procedural, with Object-oriented stuff bolted on recently. Easy peasy.
(My last job required learning LISP… it was not as easy as learning the procedural/oo language du jour)
Wired Magazine has been doing the work of identifying who the little Murk rats are that are doing this.
You can see one of them here, along with the best alt-text I have ever read. (Highlight: “Skibidi Hitler Youth”)
https://bsky.app/profile/criminalerin.bsky.social/post/3lh7vznwqpk2l
And the article that identifies these little shitheads:
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-government-young-engineers/
https://bsky.app/profile/hhesterm.bsky.social/post/3lh6sgjuzfc2z
@Gustopher: Right; I didn’t want to get into the weeds too far. Functional languages are different.
@charontwo: Well, that can’t be good for them, but theoretically that’s a cause of action.
The Trump 2.0 administration is looking like full employment for lawyers for the next few years.
@reid: @gVOR10:
I learned BASIC, Fortran, and Pascal. With punch cards. Which more than once spilled into the parking lot. Which had puddles. At least the the puddles soaked up the resulting tears.
@Scott: You have my sympathies. I missed the punch card era by just a few years, luckily. Green-screens and printer terminals (an odd thing) were about as rough as I saw. The kids today have it so easy….
@Scott: You have my sympathies about Pascal.
James, Boomer ilk and you are like seventy years old. You all had more decades than I have been alive to fix the problems you, admittedly, inherited. Instead, you all made them infinitely worse – as long as you were able to grift off them too.
You leeches are in no position to complain now that something is being done, much less believe you have any answers as to how to solve the problem. You had your chance. In better times, it would be the gallows for you bureaucrats who stole away from the future to benefit yourselves, but irrelevancy shall suffice for now.
@gVOR10: The issue isn’t so much debugging the COBOL, it’s that nobody even knows the requirements of the system or what it does.
The Government largely employs maintenance programmers – folks that can maintain existing code, making small modifications as regulations change, but who are not skilled enough to build entire systems from scratch.
After 50 years or so of critical systems running on COBOL, we find two problems: 1) Nobody knows what the code does, nor does anybody understand the internal/external dependencies. 2) There are very few skilled COBOL programmers around anymore, and most of them have long ago retired – so to lure them back into the workforce requires a LOT of money.
So we have a situation where nobody knows what to do, and even if they did the skills aren’t available to do it.