My first computing job, many years ago, was maintaining a large, COBOL program for an insurance company. I doubt the problem the American government is now faci

My first computing job, many years ago, was maintaining a large, COBOL program for an insurance company. I doubt the problem the American government is now facing has much to do with COBOL in itself. It probably has much more to do with the fact that these COBOL programs were designed to run on IBM mainframe computers and to interact with various proprietary IBM subsystems (with names like CICS, VSAM, VTAM, DB2, etc.) These subsystems are non-trivial to learn and there’s been little/no incentive for anyone new to learn them for the last (at least) twenty years. Finally, back in the 80’s and 90’s, some programs were written in IBM assembler language instead of COBOL, for example when there was a need for greater speed. Understanding and maintaining (or porting these programs to a non-mainframe environment) is also non-trivial. I left the IBM mainframe world completely 20 years ago, switched over to working only on Unix/Linux systems, did that for 20 years, and am now happily retired. However I’m sure there are still lots of older IBM mainframe people around to handle these problems, they just cost money.