by WorldTribune Staff, February 13, 2025 Real World News
Elon Musk said his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has found that the maximum number of federal employees that can retire in one month is 10,000.
Why?
Because the paperwork is processed by hand and stored in an old limestone mine at the Iron Mountain facility in Boyers, Pennsylvania.
“There’s a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork,” Musk told reporters inside the Oval Office on Tuesday.
“The limiting factor is the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal government.”
That facility, which is run by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and is operated by several hundred employees, was once owned by US Steel, which mined from the complex between 1902 and 1952, according to the Center for Land Use Interpretation.
The facility takes in about 10,000 applications for retirements each month and the employees sort through the documents by hand about 230 feet underground, according to DOGE.
“The elevator breaks down sometimes, and nobody can retire,” Musk said. “Doesn’t that sound crazy?”
“And then we’re told this is actually, I think, a great anecdote because we’re told the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000,” Musk recalled. “We’re like, well, what? Why is that? Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper.”
“It’s manually calculated and written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down to mine and like, what do you mean, a mine?”
Applications are processed on paper and stored in manila envelopes which then go into cardboard boxes, DOGE said.
OPM has run the facility since 1970, federal records show.
Multiple efforts to modernize the federal retirement system have been made since the late 1980s but none of them were successful.
Musk argued that a better alternative to that processing system is “practically anything else.”
“That’s an example, like at a high level, if you say like, how do we increase prosperity is we get people to shift from roles that are low to negative productivity to high productivity roles,” he added.
NEW: Elon Musk says the maximum amount of people who can retire from the federal government in a month is 10,000 because the paperwork is done manually at an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania.
The mine in question is Iron Mountain.
“The speed at which the mine shaft elevator… pic.twitter.com/rgjDqoPbL4
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) February 11, 2025
Timely: Defund Fake News
The American Free Press is Back!
Musk: Retirement paperwork for feds is done by hand 230 feet under Iron Mt., PA added by Editor Two on
View all posts by Editor Two →