At Last, Clinton-Gore Publicly Address Year 2000 Bug — But Continue to Lowball Problem, Duck Responsibility For It
(Washington, D.C.): Finally — after months of refusing to issue public calls for visible
leadership
on the Year 2000 (Y2K) crisis (a.k.a., the Millennium Bug), even when sharply pressed to do
so(1)
— President Clinton and Vice President Gore used the “bully pulpit” yesterday to raise an alarm
about this impending danger. Unfortunately, the value of the message sent was significantly
reduced by their rather pollyannish appraisal of the federal government’s Y2K preparedness and
by their unwillingness to acknowledge the significant contribution to the intensity of the looming
crisis made by the Administration’s failure to provide the needed public leadership heretofore.
The Positive Points
The following were among the most laudable elements of the presentations made yesterday by
the
President, the Vice President and John Koskinen, the Administration’s so-called Y2K “Czar.”
President Clinton:
- “It seems unbelievable that it’s only 535 days from
now, at the stroke of midnight, when we
will usher in a New Year, a new century, a new millennium …. It is fitting, if more than a little
ironic, that this same stroke of midnight will pose a sharp and signal test of whether we have
prepared ourselves for the challenges of the Information Age. The Vice President discussed
the design flaw in millions of the world’s computers that will mean they will be unable to
recognize the year 2000. And if they can’t, then we will see a series of shutdowns,
inaccurate data, faulty calculations.“ - “I came here today because I wanted to stress the urgency of the challenge to people who
are
not in this room …. All told, the worldwide cost will run into the tens, perhaps the
hundreds of billions of dollars, and that’s the cost of fixing the problem, not the cost if
something actually goes wrong.” - “…In spite of…progress [the President described as having been made], in the
business sector
just as in the government sector, there are still gaping holes. Far too many businesses,
especially small- and medium-sized firms, will not be ready unless they begin to act. A
recent
Walls Fargo bank survey shows that of the small businesses that even know about the
problem, roughly half intend to do nothing about it. Now, this is not one of
the summer
movies where you can close your eyes during the scary parts. Every business, of every size,
with eyes wide open, must face the future and act.”
Vice President Gore:
- “…Today we have hundreds of millions of computers and
devices and tens of billions of
imbedded chips that will not accurately read — many of which will not accurately read
the year 2000. When you have that many of them, if only a small percentage of them
don’t
accurately read the date, then the world has a problem. And unless the old
lines of code are
fixed, the problems, of course, will be serious.” - “…This is a challenge that exists on four different levels. First of all, it’s a challenge to the
federal government. With more than 7,000 mission critical systems at the
federal level,
carrying out functions ranging from Social Security payments to air traffic control, it is critical
that our electronic systems run effectively and efficiently.
“Secondly, it’s a challenge to state and local government. States use
computers to
run vital public health and safety systems, from Medicaid to unemployment insurance
to water treatment plants.
“Third, it’s a special challenge to the private sector. Virtually
every American
business, both large and small, has a stake in our information economy and
ultimately has to take personal responsibility for fixing their own system….
“…Fourth, it’s an international challenge. In a world with hundreds of
different
languages, the way in which our computers speak to one another across national
boundaries drives our markets, our jobs, and our future.”(2)
John Koskinen:
- “…In many…cases, you’ll begin in advance of 1
January 2000 to begin to see if there are
problems as you go forward.“ - “…There are a lot of small- [and] medium-sized organizations in almost every
industry
group who are significantly behind the curve, and we are trying to reach out to them to
get
them to pay attention.” - “Of greater concern to us than the states, though, are a lot of the small- to medium-sized
counties and cities, much as we’re concerned with small- to medium-sized
businesses — that
the problem with both foreign countries with small- to medium-sized businesses and small- to
medium-sized counties and cities is that they all assume if they’re not running a major
mainframe operation this is not their problem. - “The problem in the embedded chip area is the estimates — and they are just estimates,
although they’re better than the guesses about what’s going to happen — but the estimates are
that one to two percent of the chips have a problem, which means that 98
percent or 95
percent will function fine. The problem is you have to figure out which are which. - “…Even if you think your systems are done, you can never know that for sure, so you need
to
have back-ups or contingency plans for the failure of your systems, but, equally important,
you
have to have back-up or contingency plans for the failure of other systems on which
you
depend — whether they are power, telecommunications, transportation. You need to be
able
to deal with what, in effect, you would do if there were a hurricane, if there were an
earthquake, if there were a typhoon.”
“And what they’re overlooking is what I call the growth industry of the
problem,
which are imbedded chips or integrated circuits — which there are billions loose in
the world, which run everything, as the President said, from major operations to home
appliances. It turns out that we actually now run everything from oil refineries to
waste treatment plants to power plants to water control plants with people sitting
at computers responding to the information provided by sensors embedded in the
process.“
“And you have to remember that in one year alone recently, we shipped approximately
5 billion chips into the market, which at two percent means there’s 100 million chips
out there that potentially are a problem.“
Points that Detracted
Regrettably, the good that may come from such pronouncements may have been diminished
somewhat by the Administration’s efforts, on the one hand, to overstate the progress made by the
federal government’s Y2K remediation efforts and, on the other, to shift the blame for the coming
Millennium Bug debacle.
Whistling Past the Graveyard? For example, there was much talk
yesterday of the Clinton-Gore “goal” of having all critical federal computer systems Y2K
compliant well before 1 January
2000. Mr. Koskinen went so far as to say in the press conference following the President and
Vice President’s remarks: “We expect to have all mission critical systems or most mission critical
systems completed by March 31, 1999, which will give us nine months to continue to work on
them” and “…[What] we think is that the basic federal systems will either work or, if necessary,
we’ll have back-up plans that allow them to work.” He also declared:
- “I don’t think [serious Y2K-induced problems] are inevitable. In fact, one of the
challenges of this problem is no one knows what the end of next year is going to look
like because no one has enough real data. There are a lot of people issuing opinions
and guesses, but no one has enough hard data to make an estimate at this stage. Some
of the guesses are more educated than others, but they’re still basically projections on
the basis of what limited knowledge is available.”
While it is literally true that no one knows for sure just how severe the Y2K problem
will
prove to be, the available evidence actually suggests that there will be
“serious problems.”
Representations to the contrary by top government officials — intended to avoid panicky
overreactions — are likely to compound, rather than eliminate, the problem of misplaced
complacency to which the aforementioned remarks were directed. The same can be said of Mr.
Clinton’s soothing statement that “…No one will ever find every imbedded microchip, every line
of code that needs to be rewritten. But if companies, agencies, and organizations are ready, if
they understand the threat and have backup plans, then we will meet this challenge.”
‘No Fault’ Crisis — Unless Congress Takes the Fall: More
troubling still is the implication of
comments by Messrs. Clinton, Gore and Koskinen to the effect that the Clinton Administration
bears no responsibility for the fact that the Nation teeters on the brink of a largely, if not
completely, avoidable crisis, despite ample warning. It was not until 535 days before 1 January
2000 that the public heard from the government’s first-string about it. As the Vice President put
it:
- “So we’re doing our part, and part of the message today is that everybody has to do
his or her part. Let me be clear about one thing in closing. The year 2000 problem is a
management challenge and a programming challenge. It must not be a political
football. We need bipartisan cooperation to solve the year 2000 problem, not
political rhetoric.“
With terms like “political football” and “we’re all in this together,” the
Administration
clearly means to avoid accountability for its failure of leadership on the Y2K crisis. This
despite the fact that, as Mr. Koskinen noted in his press conference yesterday, Social Security
began acting on the problem in 1989 (and, hence, is in relatively good shape) and the Federal
Housing Administration started working on it as long ago as 1993.
Worse yet, Mr. Koskinen implied yesterday that Congress would be
responsible for the federal
government’s failure to perform as advertized if it fails promptly to provide the necessary funding
authority (an issue that has recently — and, almost certainly, temporarily — arisen due
to
disagreements on Capitol Hill over the character and need to offset emergency appropriations for
this purpose): “If the agencies do not have a clear ability to plan the amount of money
they’re going to have for the year 2000 and have that money on October 1st, for some of
them it will be a risk of implementation and a risk of meeting the government
deadlines.”
The Bottom Line
It is to be very much hoped, as Rep. Steven Horn (R-CA) — one of the
Congress’ most
indefatigable leaders on the Y2K issue — put it after President Clinton’s speech yesterday:
“The
denial phase is over.” One test, of course, will be in whether the highly visible public
attention
given this crisis by the Clinton-Gore Administration for the first time in six years turns
out to be a
flash in the pan, or the beginning of a serious and sustained campaign to ready the country for a
potential catastrophe.
Ending the denial phase also requires three things not much in evidence in the White House’s
Y2K “coming out party”: 1) candor about the likelihood of grave and sustained
disruption in
public and private sector services (including major utilities) — realities that not only underscore
the need for contingency planning but also just how complex it is likely to be; 2) personal
accountability on the part of those who have run the executive branch since 1993. They
bear the
lion’s share of responsibility for the federal government’s widespread unpreparedness to deal with
the Millennium Bug and for the deplorable example it has set for state and local governments,
businesses (particularly small- and medium-sized ones) and for less sophisticated nations overseas
to whom our economy and security are inextricably tied. Such accountability is a prerequisite if
any government-led effort launched at this late date is to be genuinely bipartisan, to say nothing of
remotely successful; and 3) acknowledgment that the Y2K crisis is but the first
of a series of
prospective assaults on U.S. and global information systems and technologies. The type of
comprehensive contingency planning and corrective action required by both the world’s public
and private sectors to prepare for Y2K must be undertaken with an eye toward such
debilitating — and seemingly inevitable — future shocks as the advent of cyberwarfare, an
electro-magnetic
pulse crisis (resulting from the detonation of a nuclear weapon at high altitude) and
state-sponsored sabotage using weapons of mass destruction and other means.
– 30 –
1. See, for example, the following Casey Institute
Perspectives: ‘Where’s Al?’: CSIS
Symposium Indicts AWOL Veep, Administration on Looming Y2K Crisis (
1998); Bad News for the Veep: Y2K Will Be ‘Al’s Mess’ (
Al? The Veep Is Missing In Action on the ‘Y2K’ Crisis (
to Nowhere: Inattention to the ‘Millennium Bug’ Threatens the Nation’s Security, Economy
in the 21st Century (No. 98-C 24, 6 February 1998).
2. The gravity of this aspect of the problem is belied by the
President’s announcement that he was
going to provide $12 million to the World Bank to assist in international Y2K remediation efforts
. Debate is in order over whether this is the best or even a useful mechanism for advancing such
an agenda; if the problem is one, as the President declared yesterday, that may run to “hundreds of
billions of dollars,” this initiative seems more a placebo than a serious proposal.
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