- The Office of Personnel Management said it can now process retirement applications digitally.
- For decades, the US government has processed retirement paperwork in a mine in Pennsylvania.
- The facility has been in the crosshairs of the DOGE office.
In a video promoted by the White House DOGE office, the Office of Personnel Management said it can now process pensions entirely digitally — and within two days.
For decades, OPM has stored and processed federal retirement paperwork in a limestone mine. The US government started storing records in the underground facility in the 1960s.
In a video update shared on Thursday by the OPM, Chuck Ezell, OPM’s interim director, said that the Trump administration had approached OPM “about a week ago” with the one-week “challenge” to process a federal retiree’s application “end-to-end digitally without printing anything on paper.”
Kimya Lee, OPM’s associate deputy director for enterprise enablement, said in the video that they “got it done in record time within two days without printing one piece of paper.”
DOGE’s de facto leader Elon Musk highlighted the issue in a press conference earlier this month. Musk criticized the reliance on paper records and said the speed of the mine’s elevator shaft determined how fast people could retire.
“The elevator breaks down sometimes, and nobody can retire,” Musk said, adding: “Doesn’t that sound crazy?”
The facility holds 26,000 filing cabinets containing 400 million retiree documents, and applications are still largely processed by hand — a system that can take months.
“Instead of working in a mineshaft, carrying manila envelopes to boxes in a mine, you could do practically anything else, and you would add to the goods and services of the United States in a more useful way,” Musk said of those working there.
The OPM didn’t immediately reply to Business Insider’s request for comment.
In an X post on Friday, DOGE praised the development, calling it “a great improvement from the current paper solution taking multiple months.”
Musk has said that, due to the mine’s manual systems, only about 10,000 retirees’ paperwork can be processed in a month.
DOGE’s X account later said that more than 700 employees work 230 feet underground to process applications.
Musk’s comments came as the Trump White House continues its moves to radically overhaul the federal workforce, fueling anxiety among those who work there.
“They’re nervous for their jobs obviously because their heads are on the cutting block,” a senior OPM source told Business Insider on condition of anonymity.
“This administration has been very black and white the day they walked through the door about what they were going to do,” they added.
A 2014 Washington Post report said 600 OPM workers processed federal employees’ retirement papers by hand at the site, passing thousands of case files from cavern to cavern.
The outlet said successive administrations have tried and failed to digitize the process.
The OPM source told BI that fully digitizing all the mine records would be an “incredibly expensive, multi-year, if not decade-long, project.”
They also said closing the mine would damage the local economy.
The mine is in a “really, really rural area in the middle of Western Pennsylvania,” they told BI. “It’s not like there’s a lot of opportunity in the area.”
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