Elon Musk drew attention to a decades-old converted underground limestone mine in Pennsylvania his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team stumbled upon that is still being used to process paperwork for federal worker retirements.
The 53-year-old billionaire tech mogul railed against the fed’s operation in the Iron Mountain facility in Boyers, Pennsylvania, which he likened to “a time warp” and claimed that its antiquated infrastructure renders it prone to delays.
“There’s a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork,” Musk told reporters inside the Oval Office on Tuesday.
“The limiting factor is the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal government.”
That facility, which is run by the Office of Personnel Management and is operated by several hundred employees, was once owned by US Steal, which mined from the complex between 1902 and 1952, per the Center for Land Use Interpretation.
By the 1960s, the US government began stashing records there and still uses the facility to this day. Iron Mountain, a storage provider, purchased the converted mine in 1998 and leases space there to the government.
Every month, the facility at Boyers, Pennsylvania takes in about 10,000 applications for retirements that it sorts through by hand about 230 feet underground, according to DOGE.
“The elevator breaks down sometimes, and nobody can retire,” Musk mused. “Doesn’t that sound crazy?”
“And then we’re told this is actually, I think, a great anecdote because we’re told the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000,” Musk recalled. “We’re like, well, what? Why is that? Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper.”
“It’s manually calculated and written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down to mine and like, what do you mean, a mine?”
Applications are processed on paper and then stashed into manila envelopes which then go into cardboard boxes, DOGE claims.
The government’s facility there has been run by OPM since at least 1970, per federal records.
Over a decade ago, the complex cost the taxpayers $55.8 million, according to a Washington Post report from 2014, which described the facility as a “sinkhole of bureaucracy.”
Multiple efforts to modernize the system were made since the late 1980s but none of them were successful, per the report.
Musk argued that a better alternative to that processing system is “practically anything else.”
“That’s an example, like at a high level, if you say like, how do we increase prosperity is we get people to shift from roles that are low to negative productivity to high productivity roles,” he added.
DOGE has effectively been auditing the vast federal government and pursuing cost-saving measures for taxpayers.
On Tuesday, Musk was in the Oval Office during President Trump’s signing of an executive order calling on the heads of federal agencies to pursue further belt-tightening measures.
That includes a directive for agencies to not recruit more than one person for every four who leave a government role. The executive order also empowered DOGE to install a “DOGE Team Lead” to supervise hiring.
