GAO Warns Congress About Imminent Danger from Older Computer Systems that are 23 to 60 Years Old in 10 Agencies Including Dept. of Defense
A report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) yesterday stated that "11 legacy IT systems at a total of 10 agencies, including two at the Department of the Treasury, and one each at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the departments of Interior, Transportation, Homeland Security (DHS), Health and Human Services (HHS), Defense, Commerce, and Agriculture" had to immediately be replaced because these computer network systems were "between 23 years old (at the Interior Department) and 60 years old (at the Defense Department)." Are you kidding me?? And yet the federal government through many of these same agencies is spending $billions on developing AI. As I reported recently, tens of thousands of people are being laid off right now in the Technology sector, not because AI is replacing their jobs, but because SPENDING on AI projects is cutting out budgets for other technology projects. In the case with these federal agencies' legacy systems, as this report documents, many of them use older coding languages, such as COBOL, and there are very few coders using these older languages anymore. All the money in IT now is being allocated for AI LLM development, building data centers, and developing new energy sources to power these data centers. Well none of that is going to matter if critical IT networks already in place fail to protect and run our country, or are easily hacked, as there won't be enough qualified technicians around to fix them, because they are going where the money is today, in the AI bubble.
