Home Solutions Document Process Managment OPM Digitizes Retirement Proce...

OPM Digitizes Retirement Process, Ending Decades of Manual Work in Mine

Document Process Managment

Business Honor
28 Febuary, 2025

OPM completes digital retirement processing in two days, eliminating paper-based delays and manual work.

OPM has been processing and storing federal retirement documents in a limestone mine for decades. In the 1960s, the US government began using the underground facility to store documents.

In a video update released on Thursday, Chuck Ezell, the interim director of OPM, shared that the Trump administration had reached out to OPM "about a week ago" with a one-week "challenge" to process a federal retiree's application entirely digitally, without using any paper. In the video, Kimya Lee, the assistant deputy director for enterprise enablement at OPM, mentioned that they completed the task in a record time of just two days, without printing a single piece of paper.

Earlier last month, Elon Musk, the de facto leader of DOGE, brought attention to the problem during a news conference. Musk said that the pace of the mine's elevator shaft dictated how quickly employees could retire, criticizing the use of paper records.

A request for comment from Business Insider was not immediately answered by the OPM. In a post on X on Friday, DOGE praised the breakthrough, calling it "a great improvement from the current paper solution that takes multiple months." Musk had previously noted that due to the manual operations at the mine, only about 10,000 retirees' papers can be processed each month.

According to a 2014 Washington Post article, 600 OPM personnel manually processed retirement documents for federal employees at the location, moving thousands of case files between caverns. According to the publication, attempts to digitize the procedure by succeeding administrations have failed. They also claimed that the local economy would suffer if the mine was closed.