U.S. Office of Personnel Management Declares "Last Day of Paper" as DOGE Pushes Federal Retirement Into the Digital Age

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management has declared a "Last Day of Paper" for federal retirement applications, drawing a line under a system that kept more than 400 million records stacked inside a limestone mine more than 230 feet underground in Boyers, Pennsylvania. The transition to a fully digital process, accelerated by scrutiny from Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency ($DOGE), marks one of the most concrete administrative overhauls of the current administration's federal efficiency push.

Decades in the Mine

The Boyers facility, operated by Iron Mountain and shared with several unnamed federal intelligence agencies, served as OPM's Retirement Operations Center since the 1980s. Workers there manually handled roughly 10,000 retirement applications each month, with physical files mailed between agencies before arriving underground for processing. That workflow left retiring federal employees waiting as long as six months for their benefits to be resolved. The millions of documents stored at the site will now be shredded as OPM migrates to its Online Retirement Application.

Iron Mountain's Boyers operation also holds archival materials for Getty Images, CBS, Disney, the Flight 93 National Memorial, and Holocaust-related collections, according to OPM.

DOGE's Pressure as Catalyst

The underground system entered public consciousness after Musk, while meeting with officials in the Oval Office, described the facility as "like a time warp" and drew national attention to its existence. OPM Director Scott Kupor credited Musk and U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia with creating the conditions for the shift, saying both deserved "an enormous amount of credit" for forcing a ground-zero rethink of the process. Kupor acknowledged that modernization had been discussed under the Biden administration and earlier administrations but never gained traction. He framed the change as less about new resources and more about granting permission to act: "The only thing I did that was different than any other predecessor was we gave people permission to actually solve the problems."

What the Shift Means for Federal Employees

The practical consequence for the roughly 2 million civilian federal employees covered by OPM is a significantly shorter wait to access retirement benefits. Musk told Fox News Digital that workers can now retire "as soon as they want, instead of waiting 6 months for paper to be carried into a mine." Kupor argued the digitization model — rethinking legacy processes rather than requesting additional congressional appropriations — represents a template for broader government modernization. He said the goal is to deliver improved services to the American public without returning to Congress for more funding. No cost figures for the digital transition were disclosed.

Broader Implications for Government Efficiency Reform

The Boyers milestone gives $DOGE a tangible, process-level result at a moment when the efficiency initiative has faced scrutiny over the scope and durability of its claimed savings elsewhere. Whether OPM's model — granting operational latitude to career staff to solve known problems — can replicate across larger and more politically complex agencies remains the open question for the administration's wider reform agenda.