Ancient manual retirement system for fed employees housed in PA cave finally comes to end after DOGE cuts
"Now people can retire as soon as they want, instead of waiting six months for paper to be carried into a mine," Musk said on Wednesday.
The Trump administration has officially ended the federal government's decades-old paper retirement processing system, replacing a notoriously slow, manual operation housed inside a former Pennsylvania limestone mine with a fully digital process.
The milestone, dubbed the "Last Day of Paper" by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), marks one of the Department of Government Efficiency's biggest victories after years of failed reform efforts. Located more than 230 feet underground in Boyers, Pennsylvania, the OPM retirement processing center stored more than 400 million paper records and manually processed roughly 10,000 federal retirement applications every month. Strangely though, for decades, retirement paperwork was physically mailed between agencies before arriving at an underground facility, where employees sorted and processed applications by hand.
"It was unlike anything I'd ever seen before," OPM Director Scott Kupor told Fox. "Many government employees have just been constrained by a system that does not allow innovation and does not allow some element of risk-taking." "The only thing I did that was different than any other predecessor was we gave people permission to actually solve the problems that I knew needed to be solved," Kupor added.
Despite repeated attempts by previous administrations to digitize the retirement system, the federal government continued relying on paperwork well into 2026. Elon Musk first told reporters about the mine last year during an appearance with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. "We're told the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000," Musk said. "Why is that? Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper," he continued. "It's manually calculated and written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down to mine!"
"Now people can retire as soon as they want, instead of waiting six months for paper to be carried into a mine," Musk said on Wednesday. "It's a great example of what Elon and the DOGE team was doing," Kupor added. "Rethink processes from ground zero, be creative in terms of what the solutions are, and recognize that you have to actually make significant change if you want to ultimately drive efficiency in the government." The retirement center is housed within Iron Mountain, a sprawling underground storage complex that also safeguards records and artifacts for government agencies, museums, major corporations, and historical institutions. Kupor argued that digitizing the retirement process represents more than a technological upgrade, saying it demonstrates how innovation can improve government services while reducing costs to taxpayers.
"Yesterday was the end of paper retirement processing at OPM, a major milestone in modernizing how we serve the federal workforce," the OPM confirmed in an official statement.
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