The Department of Government Efficiency is shining a light on the antiquated way federal employee retirements are processed in the digital age.
“Federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania,” the DOGE account wrote on X, sharing images of the mine. "700+ mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process ~10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes. The retirement process takes multiple months.”
While DOGE brought the unusual process into the spotlight as an example of the need for modernization, efforts to automate the system have been unsuccessfully going on for decades.
Musk emphasized the need for reform during a press conference in the Oval Office on Tuesday.
So, you know, one of things is like which we all try to sort of rightsize the federal bureaucracy to just make sure that this obviously there need to be a lot of people working for the federal government, but not as many as currently.
So we’re saying, well, okay, well, it’s if people can retire, you know, with full benefits, benefits, everything, that that would be good. They can retire, get their retirement payments, everything. And then we’re told this is actually, I think, a great anecdote because we’re told that the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000. We’re like, well, wait, why is that?
Well, because all that all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper. It’s manually calculated. They’re written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down a mine and like, what do you mean a mine? Like, yeah, there’s a limestone mine. We store all the retirement paperwork. And you look at a picture, we will post some pictures afterwards.
And this ... mine looks like something out of the '50s because it was started in 1955. So it looks like it’s like a time warp. And then the speed, the limiting factor is the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal government. And the elevator breaks down sometimes and then nobody can retire. (Transcript via Mediaite)
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"This is one of the weirdest workplaces in the U.S. government — both for where it is and for what it does," a Washington Post report from 2014 said of the mine.
Here, inside the caverns of an old Pennsylvania limestone mine, there are 600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management. Their task is nothing top-secret. It is to process the retirement papers of the government’s own workers.
But that system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper.
The employees here pass thousands of case files from cavern to cavern and then key in retirees’ personal data, one line at a time. They work underground not for secrecy but for space. The old mine’s tunnels have room for more than 28,000 file cabinets of paper records.
This odd place is an example of how hard it is to get a time-wasting bug out of a big bureaucratic system.
Held up by all that paper, work in the mine runs as slowly now as it did in 1977.
“The need for automation was clear — in 1981,” said James W. Morrison Jr., who oversaw the retirement-processing system under President Ronald Reagan. In a telephone interview this year, Morrison recalled his horror upon learning that the system was all run on paper: “After a year, I thought, ‘God, my reputation will be ruined if we don’t fix this,’ ” he said.
Morrison was told the system still relies on paper files.
“Wow,” he said.
The existence of a mine full of federal paperwork is not well known: Even within the federal workforce, it is often treated as an urban legend, mythic and half-believed. “That crazy cave,” said Aneesh Chopra, who served as President Obama’s chief technology officer.
But the mine is real, and the process inside it belongs to a stubborn class of government problem: old breaking points, built-in mistakes that require vital bureaucracies to waste money and busy workers to waste time. (The Washington Post)
Federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania. 700+ mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process ~10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes. The retirement process… pic.twitter.com/dXCTgpAWLs
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) February 11, 2025
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