We've all seen the memes and stories about Social Security, and the supposed payments going to 150 year old dead people. This all started when DOGE (as in
those beans hit hard - I need to go take a DOGE) sent in its
Virgin Squad of wet-around-the-ears "techies" to dive into the Treasury Dept's databases.
As is the case of Dunning-Kruger combined with hubris, the Orange Shitgibbon made the announcement that Social Security would be saved by stopping all those erroneous payments. The problem?
None of it is true:
Part of the confusion comes from Social Security’s software system based on the COBOL programming language, which has a lack of date type. This means that some entries with missing or incomplete birthdates will default to a reference point of more than 150 years ago. The news organization WIRED first reported on the use of COBOL programming language at the Social Security Administration.
Additionally, a series of reports from the Social Security Administration’s inspector general in March 2023 and July 2024 state that the agency has not established a new system to properly annotate death information in its database, which included roughly 18.9 million Social Security numbers of people born in 1920 or earlier but were not marked as deceased. This does not mean, however, that these individuals were receiving benefits.
[...]
A July 2023 Social Security OIG report states that "almost none of the number holders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments.” And, as of September 2015, the agency automatically stops payments to people who are older than 115 years old.
So the DOGE twats didn't know how the dates were stored and formatted, they didn't know that a missing (or "zero" date) would show as 1875, and they assumed payments were being made to those "people" (they weren't). I mean - how would those payments even be delivered?
I work with Microsoft SQL-Server (which DOES have a date datatype, even though it stores it as a decimal numnber), and anyone who does knows that a "zero" date shows as 01/01/1900. This is pretty basic stuff for a software engineer, which reinforces just how bad they are at their "job".
We knew this would be a shit-show, but this is a 3-act turd musical with half the cast falling into the orchestra pit... and we're only 2 months in.
Yikes.
Day 61
1400 days to go