The bombshell reports came quickly after Donald Trump won the presidential election, took back the Oval Office, and directed Elon Musk to head the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk, the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla, quickly uncovered, along with his DOGE team, staggering amounts of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, including jaw-dropping expenditures at agencies like USAID for woke social justice projects and funding to folks with ties to terrorists.
But they uncovered something else too: some of our government’s technology is ridiculously outdated:
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… pic.twitter.com/dXCTgpAWLs
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) February 11, 2025
The tweet concludes:
The retirement process takes multiple months.
Yes, you read that right: in the age of artificial intelligence, astronaut rescues and smartphones, federal employee retirements are processed using paper… deep in a mine. Even “get off my lawn” cynics were shocked at that revelation.
Now NBC News, not known for exposing the truth about such things, has actually done some journalisming and went to visit the mine, which is in Western Pennsylvania. The footage makes it seem as if they’ve travelled back through the decades and entered a long-gone era.
Must-watch:
NBC goes inside the literal underground mine “where a few hundred federal employees process all retirement paperwork for the entire federal government” — stored in 26,000 filing cabinets.@DOGE is working to make it more modern, efficient, and cost effective. pic.twitter.com/du456luStz
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 8, 2025
Because we have our laptops, our smartphones, our streaming services, many of us tend to think our government must be tech-savvy and modernized as well, but not so in this case:
As you ride in a golf cart into the mouth of the Iron Mountain limestone mine, the temperature change is immediately noticeable. The natural climate control provided by the rough-hewn stone walls of the decommissioned mine — a day’s drive from the nation’s capital and about an hour outside Pittsburgh — helped make it an ideal site for the federal government to process and store retirement records beginning in 1960.
Sixty-five years later, when so much is now done online, this mine is largely still how the Office of Personnel Management manages the documents of the 100,000 or so retirements from federal service each year.
The numbers are simply staggering:
Over the years, the warehouse-like OPM space inside the mine — which is 220 feet underground — has accumulated more than 400 million individual records, spread across 26,000 file cabinets, in some places stacked 10 high. Cardboard boxes and paper files in manila envelopes seem to sprout from shelves and pile up on tables as they’re shuttled from station to station.
Read More: DOGE Takes a Bite Out of USAID: Support for Terror Groups Revealed in Shocking Testimony
How Is Elon Finding Despicable Gov’t Waste So Quickly? He Has a Secret Weapon—and It’s ‘Intelligent’
Musk and DOGE are once again on target: This mess must be modernized and brought into the 21st century—yesterday. We need to take all that USAID money and put it toward things that actually benefit American taxpayers.
In one of the most iconic scenes in film history, the Ark of the Covenant is discovered (at great cost) by Indiana Jones and is relegated to a massive warehouse—likely never to be seen again. When viewing this new footage of what’s going on inside this government mine, one can’t help but wonder… are there workers or folders or entire teams that have gone missing for decades and will never be seen again?
It just has that kind of vibe.
Elon Musk and DOGE are bringing much-needed accountability to our out-of-control bureaucracy as they take a chainsaw to rampant waste, fraud, and abuse.
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