It sounds almost too crazy to be true.
President Trump’s quest to dislodge thousands of workers from the federal government is being hamstrung by an antiquated personnel filings system located deep inside a mountain bunker.
Mr. Trump’s government efficiency adviser, Elon Musk, gave a quick overview of the problem in the Oval Office this week. While the Trump administration aims to quickly cull the federal workforce by tens of thousands of employees through early retirement offers, the Office of Personnel Management can only process 10,000 retirements per month.
“Why? Because all of the retirement paperwork is manual. It’s manually calculated, then written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down a mine,” an incredulous Mr. Musk told reporters. “Yeah, there’s a limestone mine where we store all of the retirement paperwork. It’s like a time warp.”
He’s not exaggerating.
For the past 70 years, the federal government has stored records 220 feet underground in an old limestone mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania, which is about an hour north of Pittsburgh. The space is owned by the records storage firm Iron Mountain and it’s home to the U.S. government’s Retirement Operations Center of the Office of Personnel Management.
Mr. Musk wasn’t kidding when he told reporters that the federal retirement process involves an army of federal employees “carrying manila envelopes to boxes in a mineshaft.”
More than 400 million federal employee records are stored in 22,000 filing cabinets inside the underground bunker, according to a report in Government Executive. More than 500 federal employees at the site are needed to retrieve, transport and process the paper records.
“Laid end to end, these file cabinets would extend for 26 miles. Stacked on top of each other, they would rise four times higher than Mount Everest,” the publication reported.
The multi-step process for separating a federal worker from the government has yet to be digitized after at least two failed attempts to end the paper trail.
The government instead continues to rely on a manual system established in the 1970s, and the cumbersome process has contributed to a retirement backlog that in December stood at more than 13,000 people, according to OPM.
The average processing time for a federal retiree was 58 days.
According to federal employee news website FedSmith, the backlog ticked up 68% in January, to more than 23,000 pending retirements.
The Trump administration in January offered buyouts to most of the federal government’s 2 million employees. So far 65,000 employees have taken early retirements while a court challenge by federal government unions has paused the deadline for workers to accept the buyouts.
Mr. Musk complained on Tuesday that the speed of the mineshaft’s elevator determines how quickly the federal government can process retirements.
“And then the elevator breaks down sometimes and then nobody can retire,” Mr. Musk said. “Doesn’t that sound crazy?”
Iron Mountain did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the elevator.
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.