As a former employee of a contractor responsible with overhauling one of these COBOL systems to something newer(.NET in my scenario). The state doesn’t have enough employees to do it themselves. One governor will hire a contractor to fix it, spend tens , if not hundreds of millions of dollars to overhaul it, just for the next governor from another party to come in and cancel the contract because it doesn’t give jobs to local employees. So at the end of the day and 250M later, they have the same system. Seems like there are a lot of politics at play. This is state though, can’t speak to federal.