Govt. Computers Face Millennium Meltdown
The government faces potentially massive disruptions to Social Security and military operations, among other critical areas, because current federal computers will be unable to correctly read the date in the year 2000, experts said Monday.
The Clinton administration recently estimated the problem will cost $2.3 billion to fix, but it now appears that projection was overly optimistic and that some federal agencies are far behind in addressing the issue, General Accounting Office expert Joel C. Willemssen said.
“Every federal agency is at risk of system failures,” Willemssen told a House subcommittee.
Computers throughout the government face a common problem: They assume the first two digits of every year are “19” and use only two more digits to designate the year.
Thus, they would interpret 00 not as 2000 but as 1900. The government has thousands of different computer programs that make this same mistake, many of which are written in now-obsolete 1960s-era computer languages that few people know how to fix.
The problem presented by the year 2000 is just one of a range of vexing issues affecting government efforts to modernize its information technology. Federal agencies frequently depend on antiquated computers and are continuing to fall behind the rest of U.S. society in their ability to use new technology, experts say.
The hearing Monday examined six key federal departments: State, Transportation, Labor, Health and Human Services, Veterans Administration and Defense.
Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Long Beach), chairman of the House subcommittee on management, information and technology that held Monday’s hearing, said only a few federal agencies have realistic plans to solve the year 2000 problem before midnight 1999.
“If we do not fix this problem, we face the potential of electronic chaos,” Horn said.
Horn also dismissed the Clinton administration’s $2.3-billion estimate for fixing the problem, saying he believes it will ultimately cost $5 billion to $10 billion over the next two years.
Glitches are popping up already.
A Defense Department payment office in Ohio, for example, recently issued a notice to a contractor that claimed the firm was 97 years delinquent on a contract because a computer mistakenly assumed that the year of completion in the contract was 1900.
Emmett Paige Jr., the Pentagon’s chief information officer, said defense officials have not yet completed their assessment of which weapons will need to be overhauled because of the computer problem. So far, the Pentagon has determined that the global positioning system, used for a variety of navigation and targeting, will need software fixes.
