OPM ends decades of paper retirement processing in Pennsylvania mine

BOYERS, Pa. — Deep in a limestone mine more than 70 feet underground, the Trump administration celebrated what it called “Deadline Day” for federal retirements on Tuesday, granting Fox News Digital rare access to the long-secret Pennsylvania facility that helped keep millions of government records stuck in an analog system that processed retirements for decades.

“It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before, I think that’s the reaction I’ve heard from a lot of people… [government employees] “We’re constrained by a system that doesn’t allow for innovation and doesn’t allow for some elements of risk-taking,” U.S. Director of Personnel Management Scott Kupor told Fox News Digital in a sit-down interview.

“The only thing that was different from the other previous ones that I had done was that we allowed people to actually solve the problems that I knew needed to be solved,” he continued.

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For decades, retirement applications were physically mailed between federal agencies before reaching OPM’s Retirement Operations Center at Boyers; Here workers manually process about 10,000 retirements every month, and the number of homes is over 10,000 400 million paper records. OPM celebrated the transition from paper to digitized records by announcing that the millions of documents rotting in the mine would be shredded.

OPM serves as the federal government’s human resources department, overseeing policies, benefits and personnel systems that affect millions of civilian federal employees and retirees.

The Biden administration and previous officials discussed modernizing the online retirement app, but that effort never gained momentum, Kupor said.

“The idea of ​​applying for retirement online was just an idea,” he said. “I think what happened was it just never got any traction.”

The federal retirement system has relied heavily on a paper-based process since it opened in the 1980s.

Over the years, authorities have launched numerous modernization efforts, including pilot programs and initiatives to digitize pension applications. Despite these initiatives, the government remained paper-bound until the Trump administration accelerated adoption of OPM’s Online Retirement Application following Musk’s public criticism of the system.

The underground operation became a national symbol of government bureaucracy after Elon Musk announced its existence in the Oval Office last year, describing it as “like a time warp.”

“Now people can retire whenever they want, instead of waiting 6 months for the paper to be transported to the mine,” Musk told Fox News Digital exclusively.

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Kupor shared that both Musk and US Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia deserve a “tremendous amount of credit.”

“This to me is a great example of what Elon and the DOGE team are doing on a more meta level, which is rethinking processes from the ground up, being creative about what the solutions are, and recognizing that, look, ultimately if you want to increase efficiency in government, you really need to make significant change,” Kupor said.

Iron Mountain provides secure archival storage for numerous museums, archives, cultural institutions and government agencies. His holdings include materials for Getty Images, CBS, Disney, artifacts related to the Flight 93 National Memorial near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and Holocaust-related collections, Fox News Digital has learned.

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Iron Mountain Mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania. (Ashley J. DiMella/Fox News Digital)

“We have a great team that provides a lot of security, and obviously we’re in the same building as other high security agencies here. There are a number of three-letter agencies that have records here as well,” Kupor said.

When asked about any security concerns with the physical copies provided, Kupor said, “I think there are by far the benefits of moving away from paper and moving to electronic records. They far outweigh any potential risks we might have in terms of security.”

Kupor argued that government innovation is key to reducing costs for taxpayers.

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Safety sign at Iron Mountain in Boyers, Pennsylvania. (Ashley J. DiMella/Fox News Digital)

“I think the president did that and told us that we need to take the skills that you have in innovation and creative thinking and apply that to the modernization of government, and if we do that, not only will we improve the quality of service, but we will also gain efficiencies,” Kupor said.

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Iron Mountain in Boyers, Pennsylvania. (Ashley J. DiMella/Fox News Digital)

“This way we get more to the American people without having to constantly go back to the coffers and ask Congress for more money.”