'It's Like A Time Warp': Elon Musk Exposes Government's 1950s Retirement System — Still Processing Paperwork By Hand In A Limestone Mine

During a briefing in the Oval Office on Feb. 11, Elon Musk highlighted an outdated government system that still processes federal retirements by hand—in a limestone mine in Pennsylvania that's been used since 1955.

"There's a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork… 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," Musk said. He went on to describe how the speed of an old elevator inside the mine determines how quickly retirements can be processed. "And when the elevator breaks down, nobody can retire. Doesn't that sound crazy?"

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The mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania, about 50 miles north of Pittsburgh, houses the Office of Personnel Management's Retirement Operations Center, where over 700 employees manually handle up to 10,000 retirement applications per month. According to USA Today, a 2023 Inspector General report cited three main reasons for the backlog: a reliance on paper applications, staffing shortages, and errors in forms that slow down processing.

Musk criticized the inefficiency, revealing that the maximum number of retirees the system can handle in a month is 10,000, despite a growing backlog. In January, OPM received over 16,000 new retirement claims but processed only 6,700. Even when processing speeds improve, the backlog remains above 13,000 applications at any given time, USA Today reported. 

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Musk didn't hold back on the workforce issue either. "There needs to be a lot of people working for the federal government, but not as many as currently," he said. "Instead of working in a mine shaft, carrying manila envelopes to boxes in a mine shaft, you can do practically anything else and you would add to the goods and services of the United States in a more useful way."

The mine is owned and operated by Iron Mountain  IRM, a storage and data managemen company. After Musk's comments, CNBC said that Iron Mountain's stock dropped over 10%, though CEO Bill Meaney downplayed the impact, pointing out that government document storage accounts for less than half a percent of the company's physical storage revenue. He also emphasized that Iron Mountain earns $130 million annually from digital transformation services, compared to just $10 million from storing government documents.

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While the federal government has experimented with digital retirement applications, full modernization could still take years. A 2014 Washington Post report detailed previous failed automation attempts, with over $100 million spent across three decades to try to update the system. More recently, Federal News Network reported last summer that OPM was piloting an online retirement application, though widespread adoption is still far off.

As Musk's Department of Government Efficiency initiative moves forward, his criticism has put new pressure on the government to overhaul an outdated system—one that, for now, is still running on paper, in a cave, with an elevator deciding when retirees get their benefits.

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