Elon Musk on Tuesday referenced an old limestone mine where federal government employee retirement paperwork trudges its way though an entirely analogue system. It’s real, and retirement applications are on paper.
In a rural part of western Pennsylvania, about 230 feet underground, sit hundreds of federal workers whose job it is to process thousands of applications every month. They work for the Office of Personnel Management’s Retirement Operation Center in Boyers, Pennsylvania, about 50 miles north of Pittsburgh.
“All the retirement paperwork is manual, on paper,” Musk said. “It’s like a time warp… Doesn’t that sound crazy?”
Musk made the comments from the Oval Office, where President Donald Trump signed an executive order to reduce the size of the government workforce. The tech billionaire’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency has begun an onslaught on the federal government, slashing some departments and funding in the weeks since Trump’s inauguration.
Tuesday was the first time Musk took questions from reporters in a public setting since joining the Trump administration.
More:5 ways Elon Musk is working to dismantle the federal government
“There needs to be a lot of people working for the federal government, but not as many as currently,” Musk claimed. “Instead of working in a mine shaft, carrying manila envelopes to boxes in a mine shaft, you can do practically anything else and you would add to the goods and services of the United States in a more useful way.”
What we know about this limestone mine
The converted mine is home to storage facilities for many national companies and the U.S. government, according to the Center for Land Use Interpretation. It’s been owned by the company Iron Mountain since the late 1990s, and it was formerly owned by U.S. Steel, which excavated it for limestone for mills in the Pittsburgh area.
The government has used parts of the massive space for functions among multiple agencies, including the Federal Investigative Services and the Patent and Trademark Office. Since the 1970s, Office of Personnel Management employees have worked to process increasing amounts of retirement files and make storage space for these records, according to a Government Services Administration document for the fiscal year 2016.
A 2014 Washington Post report detailed the process: Paper files are brought to the mine daily in trucks, where employees pass them by hand, cavern to cavern, going over every line of employee data. This all despite multiple expensive attempts over the years at some form of automation, the Post reported. As of 2014, multiple administrations had already spent at least $100 million over 30 years in automating efforts.
How long does it take for a federal worker to retire?
OPM aims to process applications in 60 days or less – and have a backlog of unprocessed applications of no more than 13,000 at a time. It met the goal for average processing time for just five of the last 16 months and the backlog goal for none of those months, according to its own data.
In January 2025, OPM received over new 16,000 retirement claims and processed 6,700. January usually sees an influx of retirement applications; the month before, OPM received 5,020 and processed 4,988. Even in December when it processed almost as many as it received, OPM’s inventory was over 13,800 unprocessed claims.
A 2023 report from the OPM’s Office of the Inspector General found three causes for the sluggishness: the reliance on a paper-based application, insufficient staffing and incomplete applications. When there were errors, discrepancies or missing information, the report found claims could take on average over 100 days to go through.
There have been hints in recent years that OPM hopes to modernize its process once and for all. In 2014, the Post found some parts of the process were being done by computer. Last summer, Federal News Network reported the department was testing a pilot online retirement application.
But the full modernization process could still be years away as of the 2023 inspector general report.
“OPM is evaluating methods to enhance the efficiency of retirement application processing at its Boyers, Pennsylvania facility. Our goal is to better serve federal employees and the American people,” OPM spokesperson McLaurine Pinover said in an email to USA TODAY on Wednesday.