Citizen Cartwright

Risks as DOGE plans to rewrite Social Security’s code

The Department of Government Efficiency is starting to put together a team to migrate the Social Security Administration’s computer systems entirely off one of its oldest programming languages in a matter of months, potentially putting the integrity of the system — and the benefits on which tens of millions of Americans depend — at risk, Wired reports.

 

“One of the big risks is not underpayment or overpayment per se; [it’s also] not paying someone at all and not knowing about it. The invisible errors and omissions,” says a Social Security technologist.

 

In 2017, Social Security announced a plan to get funding to replace its core systems, Wired says. The agency predicted that the replacement would take about five years. That effort ended up being put off. 

 

Like many legacy government IT systems, Social Security's systems contain code written in COBOL, a programming language created in part in the 1950s by computing pioneer Grace Hopper, Wired says.

 

As recently as 2016, Social Security's infrastructure contained more than 60 million lines of code written in COBOL, with millions more written in other legacy coding languages, the agency’s inspector general found. 

 

Social Security's core programmatic systems and architecture haven’t been “substantially” updated since the 1980s, according to the 2017 Social Security modernization plan.

 

Social Security's core “logic” also is written largely in COBOL. This is the code that issues social security numbers, manages payments, and even calculates the total amount beneficiaries should receive for different services, says a former senior Social Security technologist who worked in the office of the chief information officer. Even minor changes could lead to cascading failures across programs.

 

“This is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,” says the technologist. “The leaders need to understand that they’re dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which they’ve already stated they’re doing, things can break.”

 

It’s unclear when the code migration would start, Wired says.

 

I’m seeing suggestions online to download your Social Security records. You can create an online Social Security account here.  

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Universal good news

It seems that Fix the News is giving everyone access to this week’s 50 examples of good news. So I hope you’ll have time to at least scroll through the abundance of good that’s occurring on our little planet.

But I’d like to focus on one item that's simultaneously making me smile and bringing tears to my eyes.

The European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope has captured images of 26 million galaxies, covering 10 billion years of cosmic history, The Guardian reports.

The most popular theory of the universe suggests that just 5 percent is made from ordinary matter, The Guardian says. Dark matter, an invisible substance that forms what's called the cosmic web, is said to account for 25 percent. The bulk, about 70 percent, is said to be dark energy, a “mysterious” force that's accelerating the expansion of the universe.

Adam Amara, the UK Space Agency’s chief scientist and one of the researchers who first proposed the mission 20 years ago, says, “I’m now convinced that we have the image quality in the resolution that in six years’ time, there’ll be new categories of objects discovered by Euclid.”

Sages and scientists tell us that a skill for emotional well-being is to broaden our perspective. Here are some examples, from Psychology Today.

And there couldn't be a much wider perspective than we get from the Euclid space telescope. 

Just how important is my personal to-do list or our national or international to-do list amid the 1.5 billion galaxies the Euclid space telescope is expected to document?

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EPA offers industrial polluters a way to get presidential exemptions from rules on mercury, arsenic, other toxins

Trump issues executive order that targets Smithsonian funding for programs with ‘improper ideology’

Trump signs executive order to ‘make the nation’s capital safe again’

Trump withdraws Rep. Elise Stefanik’s nomination for UN ambassador, citing House Republicans’ razor-thin majority

Maine school officials say they won’t comply with Trump administration agreement to bar transgender athletes

Anti-abortion groups move to end Planned Parenthood funding, suggest DOGE to get it done

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AP explainer of Trump’s latest auto tariffs: ‘What car buyers should know this year’

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Researchers discover a new class of antibiotics

Trusting our children with their own lives

A couple of weeks ago, I took time off to attend classes, including one from Dr. William Stixrud, the neuropsychologist who trained me to work with children and teens with and without learning differences.

 

Bill is co-author of “The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Kids More Control Over Their Lives,” published in 2018. 

 

Last I heard, the book had been published in 17 languages. Bill told us during the class that in China, a video based on the book has been downloaded 40 million times.

 

Bill says in the book and everywhere else that, in addition to unconditional love, the best gift we can give our children is to tell them, “I have confidence in your ability to make informed decisions about your own life and to learn from your mistakes.”

 

Here is my Citizen Cartwright item on the book in 2018.

 

And here is a video of Bill and his co-author Ned Johnson discussing the book at Washington’s Politics and Prose book store.

 

On Tuesday, Bill and Ned published their third book, a workbook titled “The Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child.”

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Homeland Security Secretary Noem visits El Salvador prison where deported Venezuelans are being held

 

Appeals court won’t lift order barring deportations of Venezuelans to El Salvador under wartime law

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Social Security Administration reverses some identification requirements 

 

Supreme Court upholds federal regulation banning build-it-yourself 'ghost guns,' on 7-2 vote

In House subcommittee hearing, chair Marjorie Taylor Greene calls for ‘complete and total’ defunding of NPR, PBS

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Education Department reopens online applications for student loan repayment plans

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Trump administration pulls back $12 billion in funding to state health departments

 

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Trump’s legislative branch majority moves to shrink power of judicial branch

Angry about court rulings against the Trump administration, Republicans in Congress are proposing to limit the reach of the federal judiciary's rulings, cut funding and even impeach judges, tightening the GOP’s grip on government, says The Associated Press.

 

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said on Tuesday that “desperate times call for desperate measures,” without mentioning impeachment. 

 

“We do have authority over the federal courts,” Johnson said. “We can eliminate an entire district court. We have power of funding over the courts, and all these other things.”

 

House GOP leaders met Tuesday with Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which is to hold a hearing on the issue next week. 

 

The House also is expected to vote next week on a bill by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., that would limit the geographic reach of certain federal rulings, to prevent temporary restraining orders from being enacted nationwide. 

 

Passing Issa’s legislation on the House floor would be a less severe response than pursuing impeachment of Judge James Boasberg, a move called for by right-wing lawmakers and President Trump over the judge's rulings on the deportation of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador.

 

“No federal judge has been impeached strictly for the outcome of a case,” says longtime New York Times congressional reporter Carl Hulse. “And even if the House were to summon the necessary majority to impeach a judge, persuading the required 67 senators to convict and remove a judge over a ruling would be highly unlikely.”

 

Fifteen federal judges have been impeached in the United States, and eight have been convicted and removed, mainly for criminal acts like bribery and conflicts of interest, Hulse says.

 

As far as cutting funding for the courts, the appropriations subcommittee that oversees that spending bill is chaired by Rep. Dave Joyce, R-Ohio, a former prosecutor, self-described pragmatist and one of the more moderate members of the House GOP conference, says NBC News.

 

And even if House Republicans managed to pass a defunding bill, the Senate almost certainly would reject it, NBC News says.

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About those secret war plans in a group chat

There’s so much attention to this that you likely already know all you want to. So I’ll just do a quick summary of some key points in The New York Times’ article:

 

“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disclosed war plans in an encrypted group chat that included a journalist two hours before U.S. troops launched attacks against the Houthi militia in Yemen, the White House said on Monday, confirming an account in the magazine The Atlantic.

“The editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote in an article published on Monday that he was mistakenly added to the text chat on the commercial messaging app Signal by Michael Waltz, the national security adviser.

“It was an extraordinary breach of American national security intelligence. Not only was the journalist inadvertently included in the group, but the conversation also took place outside the secure government channels that would normally be used for classified and highly sensitive war planning.

 

"Several Defense Department officials expressed shock that Mr. Hegseth had put American war plans into a commercial chat group. They said that having this type of conversation in a Signal chat group itself could be a violation of the Espionage Act, a law covering the handling of sensitive information.

 

“Revealing operational war plans before planned strikes could also put American troops directly into harm’s way, the officials said. And former F.B.I. officials who worked on leak cases described this as a devastating breach of national security.

“Former national security officials said that if personal cellphones were used in the group chat, the behavior would be even more egregious because of ongoing Chinese hacking efforts.”

 

Here is a conversation in The Atlantic between Goldberg and staff writer David Graham on what the incident reveals about the Trump administration.

 

Here is a comprehensive, well documented writeup of what happened and reaction to it by historian Heather Cox Richardson. 

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