Your government pension is going digital as DOGE targets paper documents stored in an old salt mine

Business Insider

13-05-2025

The US government said it's finally bringing federal retirement into the digital age and leaving behind one of the strangest government facilities still in operation.
In a major shift announced on Monday, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) said that it will begin processing all new federal retirement applications digitally starting June 2.
Paper applications will no longer be accepted from July 15, ending a 50-year bureaucratic tradition.
"Retirement from federal service is finally entering the digital age," said OPM interim director Chuck Ezell. He called the move a "transformative step that honors the service of federal employees" with a retirement process "worthy of the 21st century."
For decades, the federal government has stored and processed retirement paperwork in a converted mine 230 feet below Boyers, Pennsylvania.
With more than 400 million records housed in 26,000 filing cabinets, the process was slow, manual, and reliant on the elevator's shaft — a system that Elon Musk described as "insane."
"The elevator breaks down sometimes, and nobody can retire," Musk said at a White House press conference in February.
Musk, who leads the Department of Government Efficiency, has been one of the loudest critics of the system, calling the paper-based process a symbol of government inefficiency and saying the aim was to "rightsize" federal bureaucracy.
Federal retirement processing has long been a bottleneck, capping out at roughly 10,000 applications a month.
In February, OPM released a promotional video showing that, under a DOGE challenge, it had successfully processed a retirement application digitally in just two days without printing a single page.
Now, with the launch of the Online Retirement Application (ORA) system, OPM says retirement will be faster, more accurate, and less costly to taxpayers.
But the modernization effort may have consequences. The limestone mine, a Cold War-era facility that employs hundreds in rural western Pennsylvania, could face an uncertain future.
In February, a senior OPM source told Business Insider that many employees feared losing their jobs and that shutting down the mine would devastate the local economy.
OPM didn't immediately reply to Business Insider's request for comments made outside working hours.