Why The Government's Machines Won't Make It

By DECLAN MCCULLAGH AND BRUCE VAN VOORST/WASHINGTON

There are two little black clocks in John Koskinen's office inside the White House complex. They display not the time of day but how much time is left until the Year 2000. Time is something Koskinen desperately needs more of. He's in charge of making sure the U.S. government's computers don't crash come Jan. 1, 2000.

Koskinen's task is not just daunting; it's impossible. The feds own roughly one-quarter of all the computers in the U.S. The Pentagon alone has about 1.5 million machines--and it keeps discovering more. At last count, at least 4,500 of the government's most vital systems still needed to be repaired. And the studied silence of President Clinton and Vice President Gore on the subject isn't making it any easier to raise the alarm. "This is not a technical problem," Koskinen says. Right. It's a people problem: getting top bureaucrats to listen to him.

So far it hasn't worked. Last week Representative Steve Horn, perhaps the most Y2K-savvy Congressman, gave Uncle Sam's software failing grades. "Under Koskinen," the California Republican growled in a voice that could give anyone what-if nightmares, "government performance has fallen from a D minus to an F." At current debugging rates, 13 of the 24 largest agencies won't have fixed their most crucial computers in time. Among them:

The Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA has plans to ground planes if its air-traffic system isn't repaired--and it may have to carry them out. The government's own accountants complained earlier this year that "at its present rate, the FAA will not make it." The Department of Transportation, meanwhile, flunked Horn's report card for its laughably poor efforts to overhaul its 630 most critical systems, which the agency says will be complete, oh, by sometime in 2004. Still, FAA Y2K chief Ray Long insists that air traffic is a top priority, and "there's no doubt in my mind that we're going to meet our [Year 2000] deadlines."

Department of Defense. During Bill Curtis' 27-year career as a military computer programmer, he wrote more than a few lines of code that were century-insensitive. "I made decisions that we could only use two digits for the date," he confesses. Now, as the head of the Department of Defense's Y2K office, Curtis is in charge of fixing his own--and everyone else's--software screwups. It's a job nobody else wanted. Although the Pentagon began Y2K planning in 1995, repairs of the most vital computer systems were only 9% complete this spring. The F-15 and the Navy's Tomahawk missile are two of 34 as yet undebugged weapons systems cited in a report scheduled to be released this week. When pressed, Curtis admits that even the military's most "mission critical" systems--perhaps 2,800 in all--won't be ready in time. Officials insist that America's nuclear arsenal is more or less fail-safe, which means that if the computer systems go haywire, the missiles won't launch. Whether the same is true of Russia's nukes is an open question.

Internal Revenue Service. The good news is that the IRS may not be able to process your tax returns. The bad news is that it won't be handing out any refunds either. Since last fall, says newly installed Commissioner Charles Rossotti, the agency has upped estimates of its Y2K costs repeatedly, from $250 million to $850 million to more than $1 billion. It fell behind its own deadline of having 66 of its 127 most vital systems fixed by January 1998, and still hasn't finished deciding which minicomputers, file servers and PCs need debugging. Even if the IRS gets fixed, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans benefits checks come from the Treasury Department's Financial Management Service, a little-known agency through which almost all the government's payments and collections flow. It's in poor shape. As of March, FMS hadn't finished even the preliminary step of deciding which systems needed to be repaired.

What nobody, not even Koskinen, knows is how bad the crash will be. So why doesn't he press the panic button during speeches and interviews? "Would we do better if I stood up tomorrow and said this is a national crisis?" he asks in reply. Probably not. But it might get the bureaucrats' attention.

--By Declan McCullagh and Bruce van Voorst/Washington