Annie Tsai

This post was originally published here.

Wow, where to start. 

While newcomers criticizing old practices is certainly not new, it is a bit surprising to find a 60-year-old codebase representing just about 60 million lines of code, a lot of quirks, and $2.4 trillion in social security benefits annually being an early target. Yes it’s old, yes it’s complex. This is where the focus goes?

This kind of thing actually happens a lot in the private sector. Every company has some developers who’ve been there forever and know the code like the back of their hand – where there’s duct tape still holding things together, and what will break with every release.  Sometimes, leadership turnover drives these events, or a new engineer starts asking questions but inevitably one day, that team’s value is put into question and they are added to the reduction list only to be brought back as higher paid consultants to fix whatever mess was created. 

So, it raises eyebrows that anyone would let anyone near the Social Security Administration’s very stable and old mostly COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language, developed in the 1950’s) codebase without understanding its quirks. Fun fact – COBOL records date years as two digits instead of four. So “20” can mean 1920 or 2020. This is also why Y2K was such a global crisis – when ’99 was about to roll over to ’00, systems couldn’t tell if that meant 2000 or 1900, threatening to crash everything from banking to air traffic control. 

It’s a stark reminder of how deeply entrenched most of our systems are, built on extremely stable but “legacy” technology that most people don’t think about until it fails spectacularly. I’m not saying never challenge the status quo, but taking an inquiry-first vs. solutions-first approach is always a good idea when it comes to problem solving. Over a decade ago, federal investigations noted that there was a rise in improper social security payments to the tune of $124 billion in fiscal year 2014 – including fraud, overpayment, and underpayment. Since then, nearly 9.5 million more individuals are receiving payments through the SSA system and programs like the Centenarian Project have been implemented to close the verification and data gap to drive correct payouts. 

Over the weekend, 433 protests took place at national parks across the country. I certainly didn’t put “park rangers picketing along roads” on my BINGO card for this year, but here we are. With reservation systems delayed and millions of domestic holiday plans hanging in the balance, the frustration is understandable. From a strategic business point of view, even more frustrating is a myopic inability to see that investing $3.8 billion in the National Park Service is a core vector driving domestic tourism, supporting nearly 400,000 jobs with an economic output of around $50.3 billion in 2023 alone.

What I want to know is this: If the DOGE dividend is going to pay out 20% of the savings as a refund back to taxpayers, where exactly is the 80% going? 

Joke’s on us, especially since Dogecoin, widely pumped by Musk throughout the pandemic, is up year over year. It is very hard to hear “DOGE” and not think of a Shiba Inu. I don’t disagree with strong fiscal governance, but ROI on investments in humanity are long range and there is a reason why public and private have different accountability measures. When a billionaire whose companies have received billions in government subsidies and contracts announces a plan to slash government spending, one has to wonder about the actual efficiency being sought. 

The question “does democracy die in darkness?” deserves nuanced consideration. While transparency remains fundamental to democratic legitimacy, effective governance often requires a measured balance. Not every aspect of the democratic process benefits from the spotlight. Diplomacy, deliberation, and compromise sometimes flourish in environments shielded from the immediate pressures of public performance. 

Consider how constitutional frameworks, including our own, were partly developed through private negotiations that allowed framers to explore ideas freely and make necessary compromises. These closed-door sessions created space for substantive dialogue rather than performative posturing. The challenge lies not in choosing between complete transparency and total secrecy, but in establishing appropriate boundaries. This ensures sufficient openness for accountability while protecting spaces where genuine problem-solving can occur without devolving into political theater. Democracy will suffer in absolute darkness, but it can also wither under the harsh glare of constant exposure that transforms governance into a spectacle.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

True democratic resilience may not come from choosing between complete darkness or blinding exposure, but from thoughtfully illuminating what matters most – the outcomes that affect people’s lives – while allowing the complex work of compromise and problem-solving to unfold without becoming just another episode of political theater. Perhaps, like well-maintained code, democracy works best when we understand that democracy has both public interfaces and behind-the-scenes complexity.