Elon Musk highlighted the inefficiencies within the federal retirement system recently by pointing out that the retirement process for a US federal employee could take months due to the way their paperwork is processed. This process is surprisingly archaic, with a significant amount of paperwork being managed and stored in a converted limestone mine situated in the rural part of Pennsylvania. Musk emphasized that the efficiency of the process was greatly hindered by the speed at which the elevator in the mine could function, arguing that it directly impacted the rate of retirement amongst federal employees.
Although Musk perhaps exaggerated the dependency on a single elevator—the retired mine has numerous entry and exit points, including a roadway that can accommodate vehicles—his core message about the evident bureaucratic hurdles within the federal retirement procedure is valid. Indeed, the Office of Personnel Management, the department that handles human resources for the US government, has been frank about the delay, advising potential retirees to anticipate a period of three to five months while their paperwork is processed.
Historically, the system in Boyers, where all retirement paperwork is funneled through, originated several years ago, designed to provide a unified, secure, and remote location for housing and processing retiree files. However, over the years, this system has gradually degenerated due to a chronic lack of resources and numerous unsuccessful attempts to digitize and automate, transforming it into a proverbial sinkhole of red tape, infamous for its convoluted retiring procedures.
In fact, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) had flagged this issue as far back as six years ago, noting the OPM’s reliance on outdated, paper-based applications and manual processing. Furthermore, the GAO reported that the average window for processing retirement files for 2019 was roughly 60 days, a number that has seen little improvement over the years.
Dating even further back, the story of Boyers begins when the Civil Service Commission, the precursor to the OPM, started shipping retirement documentation there around 1960, with plans to retain the documents indefinitely. The Boyers mine, up and running since 1902, had been under the auspices of US Steel up until the late 1950s.
The limestone business at Boyers took a hit due to inflated operational costs and lessening demand towards the 1950s, which led to Iron Mountain taking over the property which it leases out to this day. Several other federal departments, such as the National Archives, the Office of Civil Defense, and the Social Security Administration, also began using the storage facility at Boyers during this period.
The first few rumblings of bureaucratic inefficiency began to surface during the early 1980s when it was noted that there were significant obstacles in handling retirement claims. In response, the OPM initiated the development of an automated system in 1987, only for it to be terminated in 1996 after failing an independent evaluation.
Following this, the OPM resumed its efforts to create a new system, but these plans were abandoned in 2001 when it decided instead to outsource the task. However, the respective contracts for the project weren’t finalized until 2005. The product of this endeavor, RetireEZ, was inaugurated in 2008 but was promptly shuttered due to issues regarding the system’s quality and reliability.
Remarkably, virtually no progress was made on this front until 2013, when the OPM introduced a fresh plan of action to realise a completely ‘paperless’ system, in line with contemporary digital trends. Regrettably, even now, the OPM hasn’t been successful in completely digitizing the retiree application.
Indeed, it has been a whole decade since the OPM last revised its internal blueprint for processing retirement applications. This glacial pace of progress, the GAO concluded, is attributable as much to the persistent dependence on paper-based applications and manual processing, as to the lack of personnel and the frequency of incomplete submissions.