You have got to be f'ing kidding me.

This is how the federal government processes retirement papers for federal employees, and has been for decades. 

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… pic.twitter.com/dXCTgpAWLs

— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) February 11, 2025

No doubt The New York Times will urge you to look away, but the Pravda Media seemed to think that this was a problem back before Donald Trump and DOGE got on the case. 

https://t.co/wkwDMi0IH2

— Joe Papp (@joepabike) February 12, 2025

What used to be outrageous waste is now a charming quirk of the federal government, or perhaps a jobs program for people in the Deep State. I don't know what they think, but they are no longer interested in such wastes of government money because...Trump. 

Here's how the Washington Post described the process a decade ago, and then I will share the charming story from Government Executive Magazine. As you might imagine, Government Executive thought the matter was just sorta fun. 

First, the Post:

The existence of a mine full of federal paperwork is not well known: Even within the federal workforce, it is often treated as an urban legend, mythic and half-believed­. “That crazy cave,” said Aneesh Chopra, who served as President Obama’s chief technology officer.

But the mine is real, and the process inside it belongs to a stubborn class of government problem: old breaking points, built-in mistakes that require vital bureaucracies to waste money and busy workers to waste time.

In some cases, the breaking point is caused by a vague or overcomplicated law.

In New Jersey, for instance, one researcher found that the approval process for a bridge project dragged on for years, in part because officials were required to do a historic survey of all buildings within two miles and to seek comment from Indian tribes as far away as Oklahoma.

In other places, what breaks is the government’s technology.

The rollout of HealthCare.gov, of course, was ruined by glitches in the Web site, but there are other examples: The Census Bureau had a failed experiment with hand-held computers, then reverted to paper, which cost up to $3 billion extra. The Department of Veterans Affairs had trouble with an online records system and, while they struggled with it, accumulated so much paperwork in one office that auditors feared the floor might collapse.

As I wrote earlier today, The New York Times claims there is no proof of waste or fraud. It's all a hoax pushed by Trump and Musk.

Now, Government Executives' view, from 2019:

What’s on your bucket list? Some people want to visit the Taj Mahal, float along the canals of Venice in a gondola or hike to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

All of those experiences sound wonderful, but I also have long had a more mundane item on my list: touring the Retirement Operations Center of the Office of Personnel Management in Boyers, Pennsylvania.

Earlier this month, I got to check that item off my list. I went with a colleague of mine, Joni Montroy of Key Retirement Solutions (who specializes in postal employee retirement issues), to visit the vast underground facility. The tour was led by Ken Zawodny, OPM’s associate director for retirement services; Nicholas Ashenden, deputy associate director for retirement operations at Boyers; and Robert Lorish, deputy assistant director. 

We traveled 220 feet beneath the earth’s surface on a golf cart to one of the most secure locations in the country. After we received our security badges, we met our escorts to begin our three-hour visit to a place that we had heard stories about for our entire careers as retirement specialists.

We wanted to see firsthand how retirement claims are processed and find out if the tales we had heard were true. For example, we had been told of a mysterious courier system in which a red truck full of retirement files regularly went from Boyers to Breezewood, Pennsylvania. There it was met by a different red truck that transported the files the rest of the way to Washington. It turned out there is indeed a courier system to transport files that runs several times a week, but it apparently relies on standard trucks, not special red vehicles. 

How charming! 

Here's how the process works, according to the Washington Post. 

This is how the mine works:

Step 1 begins when a federal employee submits retirement paperwork to his or her own agency. That happens at least 100,000 times a year. Within a few days, the government starts sending “interim payments” to the retirees — checks worth about 80 percent of their full pensions. This is meant to tide them over while the mine works on the case.

Then, the paper begins to move. The retiree’s agency assembles a paper file of personnel records and ships it off at rush speed.

Most agencies send these files using FedEx, and their packages arrive the next day. The Postal Service, however, ships its own retirees’ paperwork by U.S. mail.

Its packages arrive in two days, officials in the mine said.

Nearly all of those packages come here — over the winding roads, into the tunnel and through the door with the American flag.

“You don’t forget that it’s a cave,” said Ashley Weber, a former temp who worked on the mine’s incoming files. “But they try to make it look as not-cave-like as you can.”

Things do eventually get into a computer system after months of processing, but the system is so outdated that the process is glacial. 

This fits with one of the complaints made about DOGE: they are accessing computer systems that are so old and creaky that they may not withstand any serious interrogation. There is a point there, because the federal government is so inefficient that some computer systems haven't been updated in decades. I don't know how DOGE employees are dealing with that problem, but making government inefficiency the excuse for not auditing the government is quite the flex. 

The GAO did a report in 2023 on aging technology in the federal government and found computer systems that are older than 50 years, including the IRS processing center using software from the 1960s written in COBOL, a language no longer in use and whose programmers are literally dying off. 

It's a disaster, and a very costly one. 

Yet there is no waste or fraud in the federal government. Elon Musk is conducting a massive hoax, says the New York Times, which won a Pulitzer for its coverage of the Steele Dossier and the Russia Collusion story. 

They sure are sharp as a tack.