By Susan Ferrechio The Washington Times Wednesday, February 12, 2025

It sounds almost too crazy to be true.

President Trump’s quest to dislodge thousands of workers from the federal government is being hamstrung by an antiquated personnel filing system located deep inside a mountain bunker.

Mr. Trump’s government efficiency adviser, Elon Musk, gave a quick overview of the problem in the Oval Office this week. While the Trump administration aims to quickly cull the federal workforce by tens of thousands of employees through early retirement offers, the Office of Personnel Management can process only 10,000 retirements monthly.

“Why? Because all of the retirement paperwork is manual. It’s manually calculated, then written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down a mine,” an incredulous Mr. Musk told reporters. “Yeah, there’s a limestone mine where we store all of the retirement paperwork. It’s like a time warp.”

He was not exaggerating.

For 70 years, the federal government has stored records 220 feet underground in an old limestone mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania, about an hour’s drive north of Pittsburgh. The space is owned by the records storage firm Iron Mountain and is home to the Office of Personnel Management’s Retirement Operations Center.

Mr. Musk wasn’t kidding when he told reporters that the federal retirement process involves an army of federal employees “carrying manila envelopes to boxes in a mine shaft.”

More than 400 million federal employee records are stored in 22,000 filing cabinets inside the underground bunker, according to a report in Government Executive. More than 700 federal employees at the site are needed to retrieve, transport and process the paper records.

“Laid end to end, these file cabinets would extend for 26 miles. Stacked on top of each other, they would rise four times higher than Mount Everest,” the publication reported.

After at least two failed attempts to end the paper trail, the multistep process for separating a federal worker from the government has yet to be digitized.

Guy Cavallo, OPM’s chief information officer, retired last month amid the agency’s attempt to digitize federal workforce retirement papers. Last year, he told Federal News Network, “It’s going to take many years” to digitize a system that now relies on millions of pages of paper.

The government continues to rely on a manual system established in the 1970s, and the cumbersome process has contributed to a retirement backlog that stood at more than 13,000 people in December, according to OPM.

The average processing time for a federal retiree was 58 days.

According to the federal employee news website FedSmith, the backlog ticked up 68% in January to more than 23,000 pending retirements.

A 2023 report from the OPM inspector general blamed the paper-based system for a federal retirement backlog that has improved little over the years.

The faulty paper-based system is about to face an onslaught.

In January, the Trump administration offered buyouts to most of the federal government’s 2 million employees. So far, 65,000 employees have taken early retirements. A court challenge by federal government unions has paused the deadline for workers to accept the buyouts.

On Tuesday, Mr. Musk complained that the speed of the mine shaft’s elevator determines how quickly the federal government can process retirements.

“And then the elevator breaks down sometimes, and then nobody can retire,” Mr. Musk said. “Doesn’t that sound crazy?”

Iron Mountain did not respond to an inquiry about the faulty elevator.

An OPM spokeswoman said she would check on the elevator.

“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,” she said.

Eileen Chollet, a senior research scientist with the nonprofit research and analysis group CNA, said digitizing federal records is a time- and labor-intensive project that has been a low priority for the federal government.

“How many times have you heard any president talk about records management?” she asked.