- Federal employee retirement paperwork is currently processed manually in a 1955 Pennsylvania limestone mine, with elevator capacity creating a 10,000-person monthly retirement cap.
- Elon Musk, through the DOGE department under Trump's direction, plans to modernize this inefficient system that employs approximately 1,000 workers.
- This inefficiency sheds light on DOGE's larger goal is to move low-productivity roles to high-productivity roles that increase the nation's goods and services output.
In a press conference on Tuesday with President Donald Trump, Elon Musk and X Æ A-12, Musk’s four year old son, Americans learned something quite unanticipated about the federal government: retirement paperwork for all federal employees is processed in a mineshaft in the middle of western Pennsylvania.
And because of this archaic process, there’s a 10,000 person cap on how many federal employees can retire a month. The Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, now plans on streamlining it.
Musk originally found out about this problem after asking why he couldn’t increase the number of federal employees retiring in a month. Then, Musk discovered that all federal retirement documents are sent by mail and printed on paper.
The mine is in Boyers, Pennsylvania, and is called the Office of Personnel Management’s Retirement Operation Center, according to USA Today.
“It’s manually calculated and written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down a mine. And you’re like, ‘What do you mean a mine?’ Yeah, it’s a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork,” Musk said.
Musk explained how the mine was constructed in 1955, and it feels like you’re transported to the 50s when you enter.
However antique the mine looks, its slow processing time is not simply due to the fact that all the records are on paper and stored in envelopes. No, the limiting factor is “the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move,” Musk explained.
The shaft elevator can only go so fast and carry so many paperwork-processing-employees, so the mine itself creates the monthly retiree cap.
“And the elevator breaks down sometimes, and then nobody can retire,” Musk added. “Doesn’t that sound crazy? There’s like a thousand people who work on this.”
This instance of government inefficiency is one example of what Musk says he’s aiming to fix under Trump’s direction with the DOGE department.
“If you take those people and say, you know what, instead of working in a mineshaft carrying manilla envelopes to boxes in a mineshaft, you can do practically anything else, and you would add to the goods and services of the United States in a more useful way,” Musk said.
In order to increase productivity and development in the U.S., Musk believes the federal government should get people to switch from roles that are low or negative productivity to roles that result in high productivity.
“You increase the output of goods and services, which means there’s a higher standard of living for everyone,” he said. “That’s the actual goal.”
Besides records of government retirees, the mine also houses government artifcats, including “millions of historical photographs, glass negatives, and original recordings from artists including Elton John. Countless businesses and organizations also use the facility to store their digital data on servers,” according to CBS News.