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WHAT?! Musk reveals federal retirement paperwork is done manually, stored in a literal limestone mine

February 12, 2025 | | Print Article

The latest on government waste had Elon Musk revealing a relic from the ’50s that the federal government failed to update with over $100 million.

“What do you mean a mine?”

Whether picturing butterfly wings or lined-up dominoes, an astounding ripple effect continued from The Babylon Bee naming Dr. Rachel Levine “Man of the Year” in 2022 to the world’s richest man excising the waste in the federal government. Among the stunning revelations, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency explained Tuesday how processing federal retirements hinged on the function of an elevator for a mine storing “manila envelopes and cardboard boxes.”

“So we’re saying, well, okay…if people can retire, you know — with full benefits, everything — that would be good. They can retire, get their retirement payments, everything,” explained Musk while speaking from the Oval Office Tuesday on efforts to “rightsize” the government. “And then we’re told — this is actually, I think, a great anecdote because we’re told that the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000. We’re like, well, wait, why is that?”

“Well, because…all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper. It’s manually calculated,” he continued. “They’re written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down a mine and like, ‘What do you mean a mine?’ Like, yeah, there’s a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork. And you look at a picture of this mine, we will post some pictures afterwards, and this mine looks like something out of the ’50s because it was started in 1955.”

“So it looks like it’s like a time warp. And then the speed — the limiting factor is speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move… determines how many people can retire from the federal government. And the elevator breaks down sometimes and then nobody can retire,” detailed the SpaceX founder. “Doesn’t that sound crazy?”

Providing images as promised, DOGE shared on X, “Federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania. 700+ mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process ~10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes. The retirement process takes multiple months.”

Additionally, the president’s Rapid Response account on X shared a 2014 report from David Fahrenthold writing for the Washington Post where he described the “Sinkhole of Bureaucracy” where, at the time, 600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management worked.

“This is one of the weirdest workplaces in the U.S. government — both for where it is and for what it does,” he said of the location north of Pittsburgh where “trucks full of paperwork come every day,” and “employees here pass thousands of case files from cavern to cavern and then key in retirees’ personal data, one line at a time.”

“They work underground not for secrecy but for space. The old mine’s tunnels have room for more than 28,000 file cabinets of paper records,” described Farenthold.

True to form, the federal government has thrown about $106 million at the OPM facility and failed to achieve anything greater than “an 18 percent success rate,” project overseer Robert Danbeck told the Post about an attempt to update the system that had been scrapped in 2008 following $25 million committed in 1987. The turn-of-the-century updates were said to have succeeded in only five of 61 necessary functions.

Kevin Haggerty
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