It sounds almost too bizarre to be true.
Former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overhaul the federal workforce are facing an unexpected obstacle: an outdated personnel filing system stored in a mountain bunker.
Trump’s government efficiency adviser, Elon Musk, highlighted the issue during a recent Oval Office briefing. The administration aims to significantly reduce the federal workforce by offering early retirement packages, but the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is only capable of handling 10,000 retirement applications per month.
“The reason? Everything is done on paper. The calculations are manual, written on physical documents, and then sent down into an underground storage facility,” Musk explained to reporters. “Yes, there’s a limestone mine where these records are kept. It feels like stepping into a different era.”
This unusual storage method has been in use for 70 years. Federal employee records are stored 220 feet underground in a former limestone mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania, about an hour north of Pittsburgh. The facility, operated by records management company Iron Mountain, houses OPM’s Retirement Operations Center.
Musk wasn’t exaggerating when he described the system as a labor-intensive process where government employees transport paperwork into storage via mine shafts.
According to a report in Government Executive, more than 400 million federal employee records are stored in 22,000 filing cabinets inside the underground facility. Around 700 federal workers are involved in retrieving, transporting, and processing these paper records.
“If you placed these cabinets end to end, they would stretch 26 miles. If stacked, they would tower four times higher than Mount Everest,” the report noted.
Despite multiple attempts to modernize the system, the process for retiring federal employees remains largely paper-based.
Guy Cavallo, OPM’s chief information officer, stepped down last month as the agency continues its slow transition to digital recordkeeping. Last year, he acknowledged in an interview with Federal News Network that fully digitizing the system would take many years due to the sheer volume of paper involved.
The current system, which dates back to the 1970s, has contributed to a significant backlog in processing retirements. In December, the backlog exceeded 13,000 cases, with an average processing time of 58 days.
According to FedSmith, a news site covering federal employees, the backlog surged by 68% in January, surpassing 23,000 pending retirements.
A 2023 report from the OPM inspector general identified the reliance on paper records as a primary factor behind the persistent retirement backlog.
The issue is now reaching a breaking point.
In January, the Trump administration extended buyout offers to much of the federal workforce, which includes approximately 2 million employees. So far, 65,000 workers have opted for early retirement. However, a legal challenge from federal employee unions has temporarily halted the buyout deadline.
On Tuesday, Musk underscored the peculiar limitations of the system, noting that the speed of the mine’s elevator affects how quickly retirements can be processed.
“And sometimes, the elevator breaks down—then nobody can retire,” Musk said. “Doesn’t that sound absurd?”
Iron Mountain did not respond to inquiries about reported elevator issues.
An OPM spokeswoman stated that the agency is reviewing ways to improve the efficiency of retirement processing at its Boyers facility.
“OPM is actively evaluating methods to enhance the processing speed of retirement applications. Our focus is on better serving federal employees and the American public,” she said.
Eileen Chollet, a senior research scientist at CNA, a nonprofit research and analysis organization, noted that digitizing government records is a long-term endeavor that has historically received little attention.
“How often do you hear a president discuss records management?” she asked.