IT leaders on DOGE’s bold COBOL ambitions: Pure folly

While COBOL is an old programming language, it continues to be updated and supports a variety of modern development methodologies, McKenny says. It’s an easy programming language to learn, he adds, and it has an ecosystem of dev tools around it.

COBOL can be difficult to replace, because it is often fine-tuned over a series of years, and the SSA can’t afford to have its systems go down for any length of time, he adds.

“You’re re-architecting decades of business logic,” McKenny says. “There’s middleware dependencies, there’s database connections, and when you think about rewriting something this mission-critical, you need really intensive testing.”