Elon Musk's DOGE moon hoax

Some things need to stay broken to work at all.

Readers, today’s lesson begins at a museum, and with one of the most stunning displays of logic and history I’ve personally witnessed.

The museum is one of my current favorites, the Computer Museum of America (check it out!) in Roswell, Georgia. A college-age man had questions about the veracity of our lunar landings—as in, he was a skeptic. One of the volunteers on duty that day is an expert on the topic, and led the skeptic through the technology developed just to support the Apollo program, using only exhibits on display, from custom hand-woven memory cores, the permanently hard-coded “software,” to the communications gear, to the photographic rigs, and ended with a photo of Alexander Pavlovich Vinogradov, Hero of Socialist Labor, a respected scientist from the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, who listened in to the Apollo 11 mission from his porch and later congratulated the astronauts.

The communications loops that NASA used that day were not scrambled in any way. The Soviets—the whole world—was free to listen in, if you had the receivers to pick it up. By the end of the session, the skeptic was convinced. No fake program would go through the effort to “fake” all of this. It happened. We just can’t comprehend how it happened way back in the 1960s.

Even if we tried, we cannot make a Saturn V rocket, or an F-1 rocket engine today. The number of living people who have some of the knowledge used to create these systems is dwindling. I’ve met some of them, who now serve as white-coated docents at the U.S. Space Center museum in Huntsville. Even if the documentation was complete, we could not reproduce the legacy systems in place to build it, which explains why young people who don’t know the scope of the effort might question if it really happened.

DOGE agents are running amok in Washington, D.C., digging into all kinds of systems that existed decades before any of them was born. These legacy systems are byzantine, and were written in languages like COBOL, with data structures from well before the current information age. When the first Social Security Numbers were issued, the Post Office had to handle issuance, because the Social Security Board lacked any technology or systems to do it. Agencies used Hollerith cards—punch cards—to code data, sorting them in large machines, and tabulating totals on electromechanical machines made by IBM.

After nearly 90 years of legacy data, layers of information systems, and antiquated systems and software, does Elon Musk really think he can boil down the SSA to a single query based on an “ALIVE” identifier? Is he really that obtuse, or is it deliberate (to paraphrase Andy Dufresne)?

It’s likely there’s few—if any—people alive who could flowchart the entirety of the federal treasury systems that use SSN to pay benefits and other related payments to various recipients. I’m not convinced there ever was a single person who could do such a thing in the first place. We’re talking about decades of data systems, legacy programs, interfacing with newer systems, operating at gigantic scale, run by the U.S. government. Musk’s ridiculous assertion is an exercise in reductio ad absurdum.

The youngsters who work for DOGE have no clue, no idea, how any of this stuff actually works. And the people who might have some idea are being bought out to leave government service. And people who might be brought in from other agencies are being cut. So nobody inside will know how any of this works.

Some of the code and systems are so old that they have to stay broken to work. I was talking about this with my brother Jay and he told me the story of his old Pontiac Grand Prix with its 454 cu. in. V8 with a 4-barrel carburetor. One of the cylinders had a ribbon around the disconnected spark plug wire, because if you connected the wire, you’d lose compression. It ran on 7 cylinders. He told another of our brothers who was using the car about this, and of course, the other brother connected the plug. And the motor lost compression. I suppose if we knew how to re-bore and re-line a GM big block motor and piston ring, we might have fixed that permanently, but none of us possessed that skill or knowledge.

I’ve got a whole book’s worth of stories in my head about old code, kludges, and various other things that require a séance to figure out what the original developers did, but run fine if you leave them alone. It’s entirely possible that the “ALIVE” descriptor used by whoever handed Musk that table isn’t used at all for what they assumed it does. Maybe 50 years ago it was supposed to mean something, but now it’s used for something totally different (or nothing at all). But if you remove it, then everything might stop working. Or at least, something will not work right, because whatever developer had to get widget Y to work with system X found a way to “code around” it. Fix the “ALIVE” problem and you get 100 other issues you can never diagnose, never mind correct.

So, yes, it’s very dangerous to give Musk’s young troopers access to these systems. Not because they might disclose data, but because they’re just smart enough to see problems, but way too overconfident to understand they can’t fix it, because the system is designed to be broken, like all legacy systems that have been around for a long time.

You can’t apply “Delete, delete, delete” to everything. This is dangerous not because the checks won’t go out. The checks will go out. It’s dangerous because it could be years before we know what’s broken.

Going back to Musk’s post. He was actually responding to one by Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, one of my new heroes, who posted this:

The young DOGE kids want to know how this all works, so they want to delve into the systems that run it. That’s a place they should not poke their noses, but not for the reason you might think.

The U.S. government is approximately 10,000 times less concerned with your personal privacy than, say, the operational security (OPSEC) of a squadron of F-35A jets, or the location of a single Ohio class nuclear submarine. Maybe more than 10,000. Yes, there are laws, like HIPAA, that are supposed to protect your health data. But the details are left to hospitals, providers, and insurance companies. The IRS has regulations—and in my day job, I’m actually familiar with those to get into the chapter-and-verse weeds—to protect federal tax information (FTI). Much of that is under IRS Pub 1075. I can tell you that the requirements for having access to FTI, regarding who is allowed, are pretty wide open.

If you can pass a basic background check to work at a community center or daycare, get your fingerprints taken, and watch an incredibly boring video about FTI security, you can access taxpayer information. And if you get access to some of these legacy systems, the sky is the limit as to what you can see. Apart from certain “high value” individuals, like politicians and very rich public figures, who are “flagged,” these people with access can see whoever they want, if they have access to the source data.

And DOGE people are asking for access, so they can try to figure out who is getting what, and where the data is being used. If they had 10 years, and a guide, they couldn’t figure it out, for the same reason we can’t make an F-1 rocket engine or build a Saturn V rocket. The best they can do is break the systems that exist, then build new ones from the ashes. And the problem with that is when the systems are broken, people get hurt, laws get violated, and nobody is accountable for it.

It’s one thing for someone with access to leak FTI or a tax return to the media or to some opposition group. That might be able to be traced and prosecuted. It’s another thing when DOGE hipsters break an entire system because they think they know what’s going on but in reality they have no clue what the “ALIVE” indicator really means or what it’s used for, if it’s used at all anymore.

Elon Musk owns a company that builds rockets. He should know—because he read the books on it—the effort it took to get to the moon, and to build those rockets. SpaceX would not, could not exist without those efforts. His company literally stands on the shoulders of the men and women who built the Apollo gear, and the Soviet engineers who built the NK-33, which was designed to operate in clusters like Musk’s Raptor used in the Starship first stage.

The SSA, IRS and Treasury systems the federal government uses today are similarly built on the shoulders of decades of efforts and engineering (though not the Soviet kind), layered one on another. It’s not a task for the “whiz kids” to deconstruct that like it’s Twitter. He might as well claim the moon landing is fake.

Musk isn’t stupid enough to believe that simple queries on data structures that were built 50 years ago can explain how the SSA and Treasury systems work, is he? If he really does believe that, he needs a lesson or two on legacy systems. And while his DOGE minions are out there trashing stuff, maybe they need to be put on a short leash so they don’t break things that we no longer know how to fix.

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