OPM is ending decades of paper retirement operations at a Pennsylvania mine

BOYERS, Pa. — Deep in a limestone mine more than 230 feet underground, the Trump administration marked what it called “Last Paper Day” for government retirements on Tuesday, giving Fox News Digital rare access to a long-secret Pennsylvania facility where millions of government records helped keep the retirement process stuck in an analog system for decades.

“It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, which I think is how I feel about a lot of people… [government employees] they’ve just been held back by a system that doesn’t allow for innovation and doesn’t allow for something to take risks,” US Department of Labor Director Scott Kupor told Fox News Digital in a sit-down interview.

“The thing I’ve done that’s different than any of my predecessors is that we’ve given people permission to solve problems they didn’t know needed to be solved,” he continued.

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For decades, retirement applications have been sent literally between government agencies before arriving at OPM’s Retirement Operations Center in Boyers, where workers have been processing about 10,000 retirees each month and housing more. 400 million paper records. OPM celebrated the move from a paper system to digital records, explaining that millions of documents in the mine will be processed.

OPM serves as the federal government’s department of labor, overseeing policies, benefits and workforce programs that affect millions of non-regular government employees and retirees.

Kupor said the Biden administration and previous officials have discussed modernizing the retirement application, but the effort has not gained traction.

“The idea of ​​applying for retirement online was an idea,” he said. “I think what has happened has never had traction.”

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

Over the years, officials launched several modernization efforts, including screening programs and efforts to digitize retirement applications. Despite those plans, the government remained paper-based until the Trump administration accelerated the acceptance of OPM’s online Retirement application following Musk’s public criticism of the program.

The underground operation became a national symbol of the government’s administration after Elon Musk revealed its existence last year, calling it a “time warp,” while in the Oval Office.

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

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Kupor shared that both Musk and America’s Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia deserve “a huge amount of credit.”

“It’s a good example for me of the more meta level of what Elon and the DOGE team are doing, which is to rethink processes from ground zero, be creative about what the solutions are and realize that, look, you have to make a really big change if you want to ultimately drive efficiency in government,” Kupor said.

Iron Mountain provides secure document storage for many museums, archives, cultural institutions and government agencies. Its holdings include items from Getty Images, CBS, Disney, artifacts related to the Flight 93 National Memorial—near Shanksville, Pennsylvania—and collections related to the Holocaust, Fox News Digital learned.

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

“We have a big team that does a lot of security, and obviously we’re in a building here with other agencies that are very secure. There are a lot of three-digit agencies that also have records here,” Kupor said.

“I think the obvious benefits of going from paper to electronic records. The approach outweighs any potential risks from a security standpoint,” Kupor said when asked about any security concerns about physical copies.

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

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

“I think the president did it and told us to take the skills that you have in terms of innovation and thinking and apply that to modern government and if we do that, we will not only improve the level of service, but that’s where we get efficiency,” Kupor said.

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

“That’s how we bring more to the American people without always going back to the farm to ask Congress for more money.”