Trump agencies actually made a government process more efficient — A LOT more

The federal government is known for many things, but efficiency isn't one of them. But now, thanks to the tireless efforts of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and the DOGE, at least one process has been made easy: federal employee retirement.

In pursuit of "higher quality, faster resolution times, and enhanced efficiency," the OPM took on the herculean challenge in September of migrating its retirement application processing operations from a mine in Pennsylvania "to a fully electronic world."

'By hand, on paper, in a system that feels like a time capsule from the 1970s.'

OPM Director Scott Kupor revealed on Wednesday that the challenge was successfully met — meaning greater efficiency and fewer workers having to toil underground at the Iron Mountain mine.

Quick background

For decades, federal retirement paperwork — roughly 10,000 applications per month — has been processed 230 feet underground in a former limestone mine roughly an hour north of Pittsburgh.

Kupor shed a light late last year on the cavernous Boyers, Pennsylvania, facility, noting that "it’s a place where 600 dedicated federal employees process thousands of retirement claims every month — by hand, on paper, in a system that feels like a time capsule from the 1970s."

Kupor noted further that the mine "houses about 26,000 file cabinets filled with manilla envelopes, cardboard boxes, and about 400 million pieces of paper, a true testament to the scale and complexity of federal retirement processing."

While impressive, Kupor said that the mine "is a microcosm of a bigger, more endemic challenge within the federal government: outdated systems and processes that have not kept up with modern technology and that lag in terms of operational efficiency."

The process, until recently, entailed:

• prospective retirees filling out their retirement paperwork on paper;
• the routing of the paper applications by mail to the HR departments of the retirees' respective agencies;
• the routing, again, of the paper applications to the respective payroll providers; and
• the shipment of pallets loaded with the completed applications to the Boyers facility.

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Stephanie Strasburg/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Under the leadership of U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia — the Airbnb co-founder who joined the Department of Government Efficiency last year — the OPM attempted to tackle what Kupor characterized as a "50-year problem of epic proportions."

Deliverance

The OPM announced the "Last Day of Paper" on Wednesday and the official end of paper retirement processing for over 95% of federal retirement applications.

Moving forward, virtually all retirement applications will be submitted and processed electronically through the OPM's Online Retirement Application. ORA has already processed in excess of 155,000 retirement applications over the past year.

"Today we’re closing the book on one of the federal government’s oldest paper processes," Kupor said in a statement.

"For decades, retirement applications were literally mailed around the country before reaching OPM. That’s over," continued the OPM director. "By moving retirement online, we’re delivering faster decisions, better service, and greater transparency for federal employees while modernizing an essential government function."

Elon Musk, long a champion of greater efficiencies in the U.S. government, told Fox News Digital, "Now people can retire as soon as they want, instead of waiting six months for paper to be carried into a mine."

Kupor thanked Musk "for his vision on this project," Gebbia "for his technical leadership," and the OPM members who made it happen, quipping, "So long, Michael J Scott," in reference to the fictional paper salesman in "The Office."

The OPM is still in the process of digitizing hundreds of millions of historical retirement records.

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