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| - On Feb. 11, tech billionaire Elon Musk and the Department for Government Efficiency, which he leads, made a series of claims about a limestone mine in Pennsylvania where the U.S. government allegedly processes federal employee retirement claims manually.
(Department of Government Efficiency/X)
DOGE posted (archived) on X, Musk's social platform:
Federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania. 700+ mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process ~10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes. The retirement process takes multiple months.
Musk also made a series of claims about the mine during a news conference with President Donald Trump.
Musk said:
This is actually, I think, a great anecdote. Because we were told the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000. We're like, "Well why is that?" Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual, on paper. It's manually calculated then written down on a piece of paper. Then, it goes down a mine. I'm like, "What do you mean a mine?" Yeah. There's a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork. And you look at a picture of this mine, we'll post some pictures afterwards, and this mine looks like something out of the '50s because it was started in 1955. It's like a time warp. And then the speed, the limiting factor is the speed at which the mineshaft elevator can move, determines how many people can retire from the federal government. And the elevator breaks down sometimes and then nobody can retire. Doesn't that sound crazy? There's like a thousand people that work on this. So I think, if we take those people and say, "You know what, instead of working in a mineshaft, carrying manila envelopes to, you know, boxes in a mineshaft," you could do practically anything else and you would add to the goods and services of the United States in a more useful way.
The claims spread rapidly across (archived) X (archived).
The mine in Musk and DOGE's claims is real and located near Boyers, Pennsylvania, north of Pittsburgh, according to a Washington Post report from 2014 that cited Office of Personnel Management officials and employees at the site. The site also is listed on the website of Iron Mountain, the company that owns the mine, and on Google Maps as the U.S. Office of Personnel Management's Retirement Operations Center. According to the Washington Post article, retirement claims were indeed processed manually by staff at the site at that time. A 2019 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office said that "continued reliance on paper applications and manual processing" was one of the key reasons why the OPM missed its processing targets. The office has undergone repeated attempts to modernize in recent decades. Therefore, we rate this claim true.
According to the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a nonprofit organization researching land use in the U.S., the limestone mine near Boyers was operational between 1902 and 1952. The U.S. government has stored documents in the mine since the 1960s, according to the organization. We have reached out to the OPM to confirm when the office started processing retirement claims there. Musk claimed on Feb. 11 that the mine "started" in 1955.
The Washington Post report said 600 employees worked at the site. DOGE said in its Feb. 11 post that more than 700 people worked in the Boyers mine. Musk said during a news conference that same day that "like a thousand people" handle retirement claims at the mine. We have reached out to the OPM to confirm the number of people working on retirement-claim processing at the site.
According to figures from the OPM, roughly 5,000 to 11,000 retirement claims have been processed per month since October 2023. Musk said on Feb. 11 that "we were told the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000." However, claims processed slightly exceeded 10,000 in both February and March 2024. We have asked the OPM whether the 10,000 maximum is correct.
The Feb. 11 DOGE post further claimed that "The retirement process takes multiple months." According to OPM figures this is largely correct. Since October 2023, the average processing time was 47 to 73 days.
While most of Musk's and DOGE's claims about the OPM's Retirement Operations Center are generally true, one is more difficult to rate. On Feb. 11 Musk claimed that:
The limiting factor is the speed at which the mineshaft elevator can move, determines how many people can retire from the federal government. And the elevator breaks down sometimes and then nobody can retire.
We asked the OPM about this claim. We also asked Iron Mountain whether the site had elevators, how frequently they were reported out of order and whether the OPM had reported elevator issues that had affected the office's efficiency. We will update this report if they reply. The 2019 GAO report did not list out-of-service elevators as a reason for missed efficiency targets (in addition to manual processing, it also cited understaffing and incomplete applications).
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