The government spends $83 billion a year keeping old software alive
Summary
Four of every five federal IT dollars in fiscal 2025 — $83 billion of roughly $105 billion — paid to run systems that already exist, not build anything new. The Pentagon's contract-payment mainframe has run since 1964; the programmers left who can still maintain it average older than 60.
Where the IT dollar goes
Federal agencies don't report a single "legacy IT" line item — says plainly that it's "uncertain how much of the operations and maintenance [budget] is spent on legacy technology" because the Office of Management and Budget doesn't require agencies to flag it. But the outer boundary is not in dispute: of $105 billion in planned government-wide IT and cyber-related spending for fiscal 2025 — tracked on the federal IT dashboard across the 24 agencies covered by the Act — $83 billion went to keeping what's already running, running.
View data as table
| Operations & Maintenance | $83B | 79% of FY2025 planned IT spending |
|---|---|---|
| Development, Modernization & Enhancement | $22B | 21% of FY2025 planned IT spending |
That split has held for years, which is the point: "operations and maintenance" is not a temporary bulge from one bad budget cycle. It is the steady-state shape of federal technology spending, year after year, with new development perpetually squeezed into whatever fifth is left.
Eleven systems, one common denominator: age
didn't stop at the aggregate number. It asked the 24 Act agencies to name their three most-in-need-of-modernization systems, scored the 69 nominations on 16 attributes — age, vendor support, use of obsolete programming languages, cybersecurity exposure, operating cost — and ranked the 11 worst. They range from 23 to 60 years old and collectively cost agencies about $754 million a year just to keep operating, per the GAO report. Eight of the eleven run on outdated languages like COBOL or assembly code; seven carry known, unremediated cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
View data as table
| DOD — defense contract payments | 60 yrs | built 1964 |
|---|---|---|
| Treasury — tax processing (A) | 59 yrs | |
| HHS — clinical & patient records | 55 yrs | |
| Treasury — tax processing (B) | 51 yrs | |
| EPA — radiation monitoring | 51 yrs | |
| Agriculture — payroll & personnel | 41 yrs | |
| Transportation — aeronautical data | 31 yrs | |
| Commerce — financial management | 30 yrs | |
| DHS — biometric data management | 30 yrs | |
| Energy — human resources & payroll | 25 yrs | |
| Interior — dam & power plant control | 23 yrs |
The oldest is the Department of Defense's system for paying its own contractors, built in 1964 — the year Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act — and never substantially replaced, only patched around, most recently in 2005 when its mainframe was physically relocated but not rearchitected. It still runs on COBOL and assembly language. Treasury runs two of the eleven, both for tax processing, at 59 and 51 years old. Interior runs the remote controls for certain dams and power plants on a system that hasn't had a major upgrade in 21 years, and which suffered a full failure and recovery event in 2020.
The people problem hiding inside the money problem
Old code doesn't maintain itself, and the people who can still read it are retiring faster than they're being replaced. told that the average age of the developers and technical subject-matter experts left on its 1964 contract-payment system is above 60 — and that it is "difficult to find COBOL and assembly language code developers," with a steep learning curve even once one is hired. Energy's Chief Financial Officer's office, describing its own 25-year-old payroll system, put it more bluntly to : it is "extremely difficult to recruit COBOL programmers to support ongoing maintenance." These aren't hypothetical future risks. They're agencies, on the record, describing a workforce that is aging out faster than institutional knowledge can be transferred.
Washington has known this for years and moved anyway at its own pace. In 2019 flagged 10 different critical legacy systems for modernization; by February 2025 — nearly six years later — agencies had finished fixing three of the ten. And in 2016, recommended that direct agencies to systematically inventory which legacy systems need replacing. As of this report, still hasn't acted on it — nine years on, long enough for to escalate it to a formal "priority recommendation" and watch that get ignored too. This report adds eight new recommendations to seven agencies; three agreed to act on them, three neither agreed nor disagreed, and one disagreed outright.
The takeaway
- The federal IT budget is mostly rent, not investment. $83 billion of $105 billion in fiscal 2025 — 79 cents of every dollar — paid to keep existing systems alive. Modernization gets what's left.
- "Critical" doesn't mean "urgent" in practice. flagged 10 systems in 2019; six years later, seven are still not modernized. A 2016 recommendation to inventory legacy risk across government has sat unimplemented for nine years.
- The money problem and the staffing problem compound each other. Systems built when COBOL was cutting-edge are now maintained by employees who are themselves nearing retirement, with agencies telling outright that they cannot find replacements — a two-part failure that a budget increase alone does not fix.
Dollar and age figures cover federal fiscal year 2025 unless noted; the $22 billion Development, Modernization & Enhancement figure is the arithmetic remainder of 's reported $83 billion / 79 percent Operations & Maintenance figure against the ~$105 billion total it implies, not a separately reported line item.
Sources
- , Information Technology: Agencies Need to Plan for Modernizing Critical Decades-Old Legacy Systems (-25-107795, published July 17, 2025) — source for the FY2025 O&M/DME spending split, the 11 critical legacy systems and their ages, the and Energy staffing quotes, the 2019-list modernization status, and the unimplemented 2016 recommendation. gao.gov/products/gao-25-107795
- IT Dashboard (Office of Management and Budget / General Services Administration) — the underlying government-wide IT spending tracker cites for the $83 billion operations-and-maintenance figure. itdashboard.gov
Comments
Always open. Logged-in readers can annotate paragraphs in place.
Every year Congress asks the same question about federal technology — how much are we spending to modernize? — and every year the honest answer is: almost none of it. In fiscal 2025, agencies planned to spend about $83 billion, 79 percent of all federal IT and cyber money, just operating and maintaining systems that already exist, according to the Government Accountability Office. The other 21 cents on the dollar — the part that could actually replace anything — is what's left over.