When Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency whiz kids aren't busy looking for wasteful spending, they're doing the even harder work of making government systems work better. Case in point, the IRS, where DOGE advisor Sam Corcas found a modernization program "that is already 30 years behind schedule and $15 billion over budget."
"Moving at the speed of government," as Rudy Guiliani used to say.
Talking to Fox News on Friday along with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Corcas described a computer system that was going out of date in the 1970s — real museum pieces to a thirtysomething guy like himself. "The IRS has some legacy infrastructure," he told Fox, "old mainframes running COBOL and Assembly, and the challenge is how do we make that a modern system? Virtually every bank has done this, but we're still using a lot of those old systems."
He came over to DOGE from Levels, a health-tech startup he co-founded in 2019 with a former SpaceX engineer, and presumably knows a thing or two about modern computer systems. What he found is plenty of IRS employees who "are fantastic" and would probably enjoy nothing more than a modernized office. The problem is with the high-priced consultants who keep the old systems working. "They're like a boa constrictor, They're like a python," Bessent added. "They've constricted themselves around our government, and the costs are unbelievable. They're being passed on to the American taxpayer."
Is there anything wrong in Washington that doesn't involve somebody's iron rice bowl?
If you want to know how we got here, it involves a road to hell paved with good intentions and other people's money.
I vaguely remembered something-something-IRS-modernization from Bill Clinton's first term, back when he was still kinda-sorta on board with Newt Gingrich's 1994 election-winning Contract with America program, but the IRS's Tax Systems Modernization (TSM) program dates back to the Reagan administration.
By 1986 — I was still in high school, and I'm now technically old enough to have grandkids — it was obvious that the IRS couldn't rely on 1960s computer technology forever. So they launched a modernization study in 1986 and in 1989 received $8 billion to get things modernized by 1996.
When TSM was to have been completed, presumably, the IRS might have been brought up to circa 1990 standards — monochrome DOS screens or the like, no internet — in an increasingly networked computer world dominated by Windows 95 and Netscape Navigator. But they spent three times their initial budget and failed to achieve even that much.
Nearly 30 years after the initial deadline passed, the IRS has conducted some nip-and-tuck modernizations but, if Corcos and Bessent are correct, the core legacy systems will never get replaced until the consultants get their gold-plated iron rice bowl taken away.
That's what DOGE is trying to do, and that's what Democrats are trying to stop. The IRS can't afford to go another 30 years on IBM mainframes, and we can't afford any more gold-plated consultants.
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