Deep underground in a Pennsylvania limestone mine, hundreds of federal workers shuffle paper retirement files through a system stuck in the 1970s. This relic of big-government bureaucracy has become ground zero for President Trump’s push to drag federal operations into the modern era.
The Office of Personnel Management’s Iron Mountain facility processes retirement claims using 22,000 filing cabinets stacked 10 high, manual calculations, and golf carts to navigate 26 miles of underground tunnels. Workers take up to 71 days to finalize each retirement – slower than in 1977 – while private companies handle similar tasks digitally in hours. The mine’s elevators and analog systems create bottlenecks so severe that elevator breakdowns can halt retirements entirely.
Multiple attempts to digitize this mess crashed and burned. A 2008 $106 million software upgrade failed spectacularly, with test claims succeeding just 18% of the time. Instead of fixing the problem, bureaucrats kept feeding the paper monster. Today, 400 million dusty records occupy space that could store equivalent data on a single computer server.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, has targeted Iron Mountain as Exhibit A for federal waste. Musk notes the absurdity of using 1,000 workers as “human forklifts” when cloud storage and AI could automate 90% of the process. DOGE’s push for online portals and automated claims processing faces fierce resistance from unions and Democrats, who’ve filed lawsuits to block modernization.
While federal employees mine paper in Pennsylvania, Musk’s DOGE teams are slashing $1 billion in wasteful contracts and replacing diversity initiatives with practical efficiency upgrades. Critics claim these reforms threaten “government transparency,” but most Americans would rather see their tax dollars fund veterans’ care than maintain a subterranean filing circus.
Iron Mountain isn’t just about retirement paperwork – it’s a physical monument to decades of bureaucratic bloat. The Trump administration’s reforms aim to liberate workers from dead-end paper-pushing jobs and redirect them to meaningful work. As Musk said: “Instead of carrying manila envelopes in a mine, these people could actually contribute to America’s greatness.”
Democratic leaders and government unions oppose DOGE’s digitization efforts, clinging to outdated systems that protect bureaucratic fiefdoms. Their lawsuits over data privacy ignore the mine’s own history of document mishandling. Meanwhile, DOGE’s transparency pledge lets citizens track every saved dollar online.
Iron Mountain proves why voters demanded Trump’s “drain the swamp” agenda. While coastal elites mock Musk’s cost-cutting, middle-class taxpayers are tired of funding a $36 trillion debt to preserve 1970s-style government operations. Modern tools exist – it’s time to let workers use them.
