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Some people think tens of millions of dead people are collecting Social Security checks. That's not true. What's really going on is people don't understand its old, underlying technology.
The saga of 150-year-old Social Security recipients is a tale that intertwines aging technology, government systems, and modern misunderstandings by the youthful Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) IT people. At the heart of this story lies COBOL, a programming language that has been Social Security's backbone for decades.
COBOL code and arcane standards
COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, was developed in the 1950s and has become a critical component of the Social Security Administration's (SSA) IT infrastructure. The SSA maintains over 60 million lines of COBOL code, which powers its core business functions, including processing retirement and disability claims.
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One of COBOL's peculiarities is its lack of a standardized way to store and work with dates. This limitation has led to programmers making up ways in government databases to represent dates. This also meant they came up with the use of placeholder dates for unknown information.
According to Manjeet Rege, data science and software engineering professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Engineering, one of the most common placeholder dates is May 20, 1875. Why that date? Because that's the beginning of time according to the ISO 8601 time and date standard.
Now, you may well ask why the standard makers picked that seemingly arbitrary date? The answer is it's not arbitrary at all, just obscure. It's the anniversary of the International Bureau of Weight and Measures creation date, aka the metric system.
What that means in practice is that, in at least some cases, if someone applies for Social Security without a birth date, they'd automatically be assigned a birthdate of May 20, 1875, which is how we end up with 149+-year-old senior citizens.
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