American taxpayers’ retirements are being liberated from a paper prison deep inside a federal mountain fortress built in the 1960s, Elon Musk’s team announced recently.
After a stunning discovery last week, Americans are now learning that retirement funds are processed by the federal government using an antiquated paper record method — buried in a guarded mountain deep in an underground limestone mine.
It’s the latest shocking revelation brought to light by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team and their audit of federal spending.
The Iron Mountain storage facility in Boyers, Pennsylvania – located an hour outside Pittsburgh – houses an astonishing 400 million pieces of paper in 26,000 file cabinets that are stacked up to 10 high. This bureaucratic labyrinth, 220 feet below ground, is how the Office of Personnel Management has managed retirements since 1960.
Let that sink in: the federal retirement processing remains stuck using the same technology they used before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
“It is still done on paper,” admitted Alita Haniwalt, an OPM program manager in retirement claims. “I think it becomes overwhelming because there are no two retirements that are the same.”
Even NBC News was stunned. Take a look —
NBC goes inside the literal underground mine "where a few hundred federal employees process all retirement paperwork for the entire federal government" — stored in 26,000 filing cabinets.@DOGE is working to make it more modern, efficient, and cost effective. pic.twitter.com/du456luStz
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 8, 2025
This underground paper fortress employs 700 workers who process about 10,000 retirement applications monthly – roughly 100,000 per year. The process can take months, with a single missing signature setting the task back weeks. Meanwhile, cardboard boxes and manila envelopes pile up on tables as they’re shuttled from station to station in what Musk aptly called a “time warp.”
When DOGE’s team first visited the facility, they were reportedly shocked.
Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, who joined the DOGE mission, recounted the moment: “They were talking about how it’s a place where all the papers are stored for a manual retirement process. It’s been around for decades. It’s been tried to be digitized for decades, unsuccessfully, and it’s a painful, slow process.”
Musk highlighted the absurdity and explained that if the “elevator breaks down … nobody can retire. Doesn’t that sound crazy?”
While the underground location provides natural climate control and security benefits – including armed checkpoints and 24/7 surveillance – the paper-based process remains an extremely inefficient relic in our digital world.
Take a look —
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
But change is finally coming. In February, under DOGE’s direction, OPM processed its first all-digital federal retirement in just two days – crushing the one-week goal they’d set.
“It really became a proof point and a rallying cry to everyone to say this is possible. Now we get to go build the product behind that and actually do something that’s scalable,” Gebbia said. His Digital Retirement Project aims to transform this underground paper prison into a modern system.
“We really believe that government can have an Apple store-like experience,” Gebbia said. “Beautifully designed, great user experience, modern systems.”
Matt MacIsaac, who runs day-to-day operations at the mine for OPM since 2016, said the modernization efforts are very welcome.
“We’re ready to make this process better, make it more efficient and really get what we need for the civil servants.”
This paper labyrinth is just one target in DOGE’s mission to find $1 trillion in government savings by 2026. So far, DOGE claims to have saved $140 billion by cutting contracts, reducing waste, and targeting mass fraud across multiple departments, including Education, Defense, and USAID.
“This is a revolution,” Musk declared, “and I think it might be the biggest revolution in the government since the original revolution.”
As NBC News reporters recently discovered during their rare access to this underground time capsule, the mine – originally used to excavate limestone for steel mills before Iron Mountain purchased it in 1998 – feels like stepping back decades in time.
One can’t help but wonder if, like in the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, important documents have disappeared into this cavernous bureaucratic maze, never to be seen again. For federal workers waiting months for their retirement processing, that feeling is all too real.
Now that this paper labyrinth has been exposed to daylight, perhaps we can finally bring federal retirement processing into the 21st century – and redirect the savings to projects that actually benefit American taxpayers.