The federal paperwork mine in DOGE's crosshairs is real and bizarre

The converted mine in Pennsylvania used to store and process federal retirement paperwork is real, and now under threat.

In a press conference in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, said that the US government stores and processes all retirement paperwork in a limestone mine.

"The elevator breaks down sometimes, and nobody can retire," Musk said, adding: "Doesn't that sound crazy?"

His comments came as the Trump White House continued its moves to radically alter the federal workforce.

Musk said that the aim was to "right-size" federal bureaucracy and that getting people to retire early on full benefits was a good thing.

But he added: "We were told the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000 because all the retirement paperwork is written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down a mine."

Musk said: "Instead of working in a mineshaft, carrying manila envelopes to boxes in a mine, you could do practically anything else, and you would add to the goods and services of the United States in a more useful way."

DOGE's X account later published photos of the facility.

It said more than 700 employees work 230 feet underground to process about 10,000 federal employee retirement applications a month, adding that the process could take several months.

A 2014 Washington Post report said 600 Office of Personnel Management workers processed federal employees' retirement papers by hand at the site, with them passing thousands of case files from cavern to cavern.

The manual process continues to operate because of successive administrations' failures to automate it, the outlet said, delaying how fast workers receive their full retirement benefits.

In an interview last year with Federal News Network, OPM's then-chief information officer, Guy Cavallo, said that the agency was testing an online platform for retirement applications but that it would take "many years" to implement.

The Office of Personnel Management didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

A 2015 prospectus for the facility by the General Services Administration said the mine, which has been occupied by OPM since 1970, is in Boyers, Pennsylvania, and has about 580,000 rentable square feet.

The mine was originally owned by US Steel, which excavated the site from 1902 to 1952, before the US government started storing records there in 1960, the Center for Land Use Interpretation says.

Iron Mountain, a global management and storage service provider, acquired the mine's owner in 1998, the center says, and it continues to lease space in its underground facility to the US government.

Iron Mountain didn't reply to a request for comment.

In 2015, the GSA said parts of the mine's ceiling were degrading. It proposed acquiring a new space to provide a "long-term solution" for federal agencies operating in the mine. It's unclear whether anything came of that proposal.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation says the mine is also used to store films and documents for private companies and groups, including the Corbis photographic collection Bill Gates sold to Visual China Group in 2016.

Correction: February 12, 2025 — An earlier version of this story misstated the position Guy Cavallo held last year at the Office of Personnel Management. He was its chief information officer, not its CEO.