- Elon Musk said on Tuesday that the government stores key retirement paperwork in a converted mine.
- The limestone mine is real, and is in the Department of Government Efficiency’s crosshairs.
- The US government started storing records in the underground facility in the 1960s.
A converted mine located in Pennsylvania and used to store and process federal retirement paperwork is actually real, and is now under threat.
In a press conference in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Elon Musk 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?”
Musk’s comments came as the Trump White House continues its moves to radically alter the federal workforce.
Musk said they were trying to “right-size” the 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 that “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.”
The Department of Government Efficiency’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 can take several months.
According to a 2014 Washington Post report, 600 OMP workers process federal employees’ retirement papers by hand at the site, passing thousands of case files from cavern to cavern.
The manual process continues to operate due to successive administrations’ failures to automate it, the outlet reported, delaying how fast workers can receive their full retirement benefits.
In an interview last year with Federal News Network, OMP’s then-CEO said the agency was testing an online platform for retirement applications, but he said it would take “many years” to implement.
The Office of Personnel Management didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
A 2015 prospectus of the facility by the General Services Administration said the mine, which has been occupied by the Office of Personnel Management since 1970, is located 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, according to the Center for Land Use Interpretation.
Iron Mountain, a global management and storage service provider, acquired the mine’s owner in 1998, it said, and 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 warned that 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 is unclear if anything came of that proposal.
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.
