Trump Administration Orders US Government Work On Y2K Bug To Stop

The Millennium Bug is finally being put to rest by the US federal government, as the Trump administration has ordered work on the Year 2000 bug to stop.

Bloomberg reported that 17 years after the Y2K, where the change to the new millennium was expected to wreak havoc with the internal clocks of computers but had little affect at all, federal agencies will be allowed to stop preparing updates to tackle the threat of the bug.

Under an obscure rule, federal agencies are required to keep providing updates on how prepared they are for the Y2K bug, which costs the US government a fair amount of paperwork.

Squashing the Millennium Bug

The move by President Donald Trumps administration is part of a mission to cut out tasks federal agencies are required to carry out that waste time and money.

For example, Trump’s administration is looking to remove a rule that forces the Pentagon to file a report every time it pays a small business vendor.

“We’re looking for stuff everyone agrees is a complete waste of time,” Mick Mulvaney, director at the Office of Management and Budget told reporters at the White House.

Cutting out such arguably unnecessary processes is part of Trump’s missive to remove regulations that get in the way of the operations of federal agencies.

The administration has cut more than 50 paperwork requirements for federal agencies, seven of which related to the Y2K bug, which is estimated will save tens of thousands of man-hours for agencies.

However, Reuters reported that Linda Springer, a senior adviser at the Office of Management and Budget, noted that the removal of regulations around the Y2K bug will not save a huge amount of time spent on paperwork as many agencies simply ignore the requirements around updates for the Millennium Bug.

For more on the Millennium Bug, check out our tech history of the Y2K bug.

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