Deep inside a limestone mine 230 feet underground, the Trump administration just ended 65 years of paper-based federal retirement processing — and gave Fox News Digital rare access to the Pennsylvania facility that became a national symbol of government waste after Elon Musk called it out.
“Now people can retire as soon as they want, instead of waiting six months for paper to be carried into a mine,” Musk told Fox News Digital.
For decades, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management manually processed roughly 10,000 retirements each month using paper applications physically mailed between agencies. The Boyers, Pennsylvania facility houses over 400 million paper records — all of which will now be shredded as OPM moves to digital.
“It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before… I believe that many government employees have just been constrained by a system that does not allow innovation and does not allow some element of risk-taking.”
OPM Director Scott Kupor told Fox News Digital the Biden administration had discussed modernizing the system but never gained traction.
“The idea of the online retirement application was an idea,” Kupor said. “I think what happened was it never got traction.”
The underground operation became a lightning rod after Musk revealed its existence in the Oval Office last year, describing it as “like a time warp.” The federal retirement system had relied on the largely paper-based process since the 1980s — multiple modernization efforts and pilot programs failed to break the dependence on paper until the Trump administration accelerated adoption of OPM’s Online Retirement Application.
Kupor credited both Musk and U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia with driving the change.
“It’s a great example to me of the more meta level of what Elon and the DOGE team was doing, which is rethink processes from ground zero, be creative in terms of what the solutions are and recognize that, look, you have to actually make significant change if you want to ultimately drive efficiency in the government,” Kupor said.
Iron Mountain — the private company operating the limestone mine facility — provides secure archival storage for museums, archives, cultural institutions and government agencies. Its holdings include materials for Getty Images, CBS, Disney, artifacts related to the Flight 93 National Memorial, and Holocaust-related collections. Multiple three-letter federal agencies also store records there.
“The only thing I did that was different than any other predecessor was we gave people permission to actually solve the problems that I knew needed to be solved.”
When asked about security concerns with the physical copies, Kupor argued the benefits of going electronic far outweigh any risks.
“We have a great team who does a lot of security, and obviously we’re in a building here with other very highly secure agencies,” Kupor said.
Kupor framed government innovation as essential to reducing costs for taxpayers.
“I think what the president has done and told us is take the skills that you have around innovation and creative thinking and apply that to modernization for the government and if we do that, we’ll not only improve the quality of service, but that is where we get efficiency,” he said.
“That’s how we actually deliver more for the American people without constantly going to have to go back to the till and ask Congress for more money.”
OPM functions as the federal government’s human resources department, overseeing policies, benefits and personnel systems for millions of civilian federal employees and retirees. The agency called Tuesday the “Last Day of Paper” for federal retirements — marking the end of a system that had trapped retirement processing in an analog black hole since the 1980s.
