A private storage facility in Butler County found itself in the spotlight after being indirectly mentioned by Elon Musk on Tuesday.
The billionaire owner of X and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Musk is serving as an adviser to President Donald Trump, spearheading the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to downsize the federal government. In an appearance with Trump in the Oval Office, Musk highlighted one potential inefficiency when it comes to retirement.
“All that retirement paperwork is manual on paper. It’s manually calculated,” Musk said. “They’re written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down a mine and, like, what do you mean a mine? Like, yeah, there’s a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork.”
WILD. Elon says the most number of people that can retire in a month is 10,000 because the government uses a limestone mine to hold all retirement paperwork which is done manually and stored via a shaft‼️ pic.twitter.com/MgMK9DlZyq
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 11, 2025
That former limestone mine would be Iron Mountain’s facility in Boyers, about an hour north of Pittsburgh. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management utilizes the Boyers site to store and process the mountains of paperwork generated when federal workers retire.
Federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania. 700+ mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process ~10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes. The retirement process… pic.twitter.com/dXCTgpAWLs
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) February 11, 2025
“This mine looks like something out of the ’50s because it was started in 1955,” Musk said. “It’s like a time warp.”
Related
• Inside ‘The Underground’: Iron Mountain in Butler County preserves audio, video, digital media for the future
• Iron Mountain digs deep in Butler County mine to bring in clients
The outdated retirement process isn’t exactly something Musk just uncovered, as in 2014, The Washington Post detailed the retirement process in an article with the headline “Sinkhole of bureaucracy.”
Besides the OPM, Iron Mountain’s secure facility includes more than 2,300 clients, with the large-scale underground storage site used to store documents, data centers and historic artifacts. It’s also one of the homes of Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services, which focuses on preservation and digitization of media for clients like Universal Music Group.
