every time you hear about the COBOL programmer shortage please mentally substitute:

"We were too cheap to pay for maintenance, so no new programmers learned COBOL."

You could also try,

"We have bad software procurement and treat software as a finished product rather than an integrated part of our process, so there was no institutional incentive to keep the system up-to-date."

Or maybe,

"We don& #39;t care about effectively serving our users, because who cares about unemployed people, and so why would we throw money at improving these systems in non-emergencies?"