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We’ve heard a great deal over the last few weeks about government waste and inefficiency, but this is the weirdest example yet of how dysfunctional the federal government really is. This is the government we’re talking about, however, and so this manifestation of government inefficiency will likely be eclipsed next week, but for the moment, this is the one that takes the cake.

Fox News reported Wednesday that Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are investigating Iron Mountain, a converted limestone mine in Pennsylvania where “federal employee retirements are processed manually using a system that could take months.” If you’re trying to make drastic cuts in the number of federal employees, this could pose a serious problem, and that’s why it has come to the attention of Musk and Trump.

During his appearance in the Oval Office with his four-year-old son, Musk said: “And then we’re told this is actually, I think, a great anecdote, because we’re told the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000.” This is because of an antiquated and inefficient system that no one has ever gotten around to fixing. Musk continued: “We’re like, well, what? Why is that? Well, because all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper. It’s manually calculated and written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down to mine and like, what do you mean, a mine?”

That’s right: in this computer age, if you want to retire from your cushy federal job, maybe to take that cushy establishment media job you’ve been eyeing, you have to fill out paperwork. Not digital forms, but old-fashioned paperwork that then gets sent to an old limestone mine for processing. On X, DOGE explained: “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 takes multiple months.”

Back in 2014, when even the leftist establishment professed to care about government waste and inefficiency, the Washington Post exposed this curious operation, as a Post writer reminded the world that he had that great novel in him, beginning his article this way: “The trucks full of paperwork come every day, turning off a country road north of Pittsburgh and descending through a gateway into the earth. Underground, they stop at a metal door decorated with an American flag.”

Once you got inside, “a room opens up as big as a supermarket, full of five-drawer file cabinets and people in business casual. About 230 feet below the surface, there is easy-listening music playing at somebody’s desk. This is one of the weirdest workplaces in the U.S. government — both for where it is and for what it does.” The Post said that “600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management” worked there, doing nothing but processing retirement papers.

“But that system,” the Post said, “has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper.” And so “this odd place is an example of how hard it is to get a time-wasting bug out of a big bureaucratic system,” for “held up by all that paper, work in the mine runs as slowly now as it did in 1977.” One old bureaucrat said: “The need for automation was clear — in 1981.”

Now here it is 2025, and the Democrats are in hysterics over the prospect that Musk might make this ridiculously antiquated system work more efficiently. Fox states that “multiple attempts to digitize the system have been made since 1987,” and that $130 million more was wasted in the process.

Musk noted that the whole operation was “like a time warp,” observing that this cumbersome process impedes the Trump administration’s plans to lay off large numbers of federal workers at once: “And then the speed, the limiting factor is the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move, determines how many people can retire from the federal government. And the elevator breaks down and sometimes, and then you can’t, nobody can retire. Doesn’t that sound crazy?” In a word, yes.

Iron Mountain may not last much longer. Musk said: “the people voted for major government reform, and that’s what the people are going to get.” Bravo.