I'm trying to be charitable on this code base issue, and the institutions will need to accept they need to be able to bear more scrutiny on the inputs to policy recommendations.

Both R and Python are taught in highschool and undergraduate courses for scientific data analysis. Ferguson and other scientists did not need software engineers. A free co-op student, or to have spent the three weeks learning a language that met the needs of the level of abstraction he was working at would have sufficed.

The culture that enables that code as described to be acceptable for policymaking is one that intentionally produces complex black boxes that obfuscate risk and attribution, and to launder decision accountability through technology. I've seen this in other institutional code as well.

However, while the policy recommendations that resulted from his model may (or may not) have saved tens of thousands of lives, it did so at the risk of losing the credibility to do it again.

Deflecting blame to nebulous software engineers is disingenuous and serves mainly to exacerbate the suspicions of reasonable people, and further polarize those most harmed by the policy response.