House Panel Warns of Year 2000 Computer Crisis
In the most dramatic warning yet of an impending computer crisis in the government, a congressional panel said Wednesday that 37% of the most critical computers used by federal agencies will not be updated in time to handle dates in the year 2000 and will be subject to widespread failure.
The estimate calls into sharp question past assurances by the Clinton administration that it is moving quickly enough to avert serious outages that could undermine military forces, benefit payments to the public and the nation’s air transportation system, among much else.
With just 666 days left until the year 2000, a slew of reports and investigations in recent weeks have raised serious concerns that the government is not acting fast enough to avoid serious problems.
The executive branch has almost 8,000 computer systems that are considered critical to government operations, and nearly 3,000 of them will not be able to read dates in 2000, according to the report issued by the subcommittee on government management, information and technology of the House Government Operations and Oversight Committee. The computers will either shut down or spew out erroneous data.
California Rep. Steve Horn (R-Long Beach), the subcommittee chairman who has taken the lead in Congress in solving the problem, issued a “report card” along with the new report that gave the federal government a D-minus in its efforts to avoid a crisis.
“Failure is intolerable,” Horn said.
The year 2000 problem results from widespread use of two digits in software to designate years. Computers assume that every year starts with “19,” so when 2000 arrives, they will interpret “00” as the year 1900.
President Clinton created a White House panel on Feb. 4 to lead the government’s efforts in solving the problem and appointed John A. Koskinen, former deputy director at the Office of Management and Budget, to lead the effort. But Koskinen has not yet started his work, and his panel has hardly gotten off the ground after 28 days, according to Horn’s staff.
White House press officials did not respond to queries about Horn’s report.
As the scope of the government’s problems become clearer, the cost to avert a crisis is also growing. The Office of Management and Budget had long insisted that the problem would cost a little more than $2.3 billion to fix, but that figure has been growing over the last year. Its most recent estimate pegged the cost at $4 billion.
Horn estimated that the government is facing a cost of $10 billion.
