EXCLUSIVE: Inside the secretive mine DOGE helped drag out of a decades-old bureaucratic black hole

BOYERS, Pa. — Deep inside a limestone mine more than 230 feet underground, the Trump administration marked what it called the "Last Day of Paper" for federal retirements Tuesday, giving Fox News Digital rare access to the long-secretive Pennsylvania facility where millions of government records helped keep the retirement process trapped in an analog system for decades.

"It was unlike anything I'd ever seen before, which I think is the reaction that I generally hear from lots of people… I believe that many [government employees] have just been constrained by a system that does not allow innovation and does not allow some element of risk-taking," U.S. Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told Fox News Digital in a sit-down interview.

"The only thing I did that was different than any other predecessor was we gave people permission to actually solve the problems that I knew needed to be solved," he continued. 

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For decades, retirement applications were physically mailed between federal agencies before arriving at OPM's Retirement Operations Center in Boyers, where workers manually processed roughly 10,000 retirements each month and houses over 400 million paper records. OPM celebrated moving from the paper system to digitized records, explaining the millions of documents languishing in the mine will be shredded.

OPM functions as the federal government’s human resources department, overseeing the policies, benefits and personnel systems that affect millions of civilian federal employees and retirees.

Kupor said the Biden administration and previous officials had discussed modernizing the online retirement application, but the effort never gained momentum. 

"The idea of the online retirement application was an idea," he said. "I think what happened was it never got traction."

The federal retirement system has relied on a largely paper-based process since it opened in the 1980s. 

Over the years, officials launched multiple modernization efforts, including pilot programs and attempts to digitize retirement applications. Despite those initiatives, the government remained dependent on paper until the Trump administration accelerated adoption of OPM's Online Retirement Application following Musk's public criticism of the system.

The underground operation became a national symbol of government bureaucracy after Elon Musk revealed its existence last year, calling it "like a time warp," while in the Oval Office.

"Now people can retire as soon as they want, instead of waiting 6 months for paper to be carried into a mine," Musk exclusively told Fox News Digital. 

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Kupor shared that both Musk and U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia deserve an "enormous amount of credit."

"It's a great example to me of the more meta level of what Elon and the DOGE team was doing, which is rethink processes from ground zero, be creative in terms of what the solutions are and recognize that, look, you have to actually make significant change if you want to ultimately drive efficiency in the government," said Kupor.

Iron Mountain provides secure archival storage for numerous museums, archives, cultural institutions and government agencies. Its holdings include materials for Getty Images, CBS, Disney, artifacts related to the Flight 93 National Memorial—near Shanksville, Pennsylvania—and Holocaust-related collections, Fox News Digital learned.

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"We have a great team who does a lot of security, and obviously we're in a building here with other very highly secure agencies. There's a number of kind of three-letter agencies who also have records here," said Kupor.

"I think by far the benefits of obviously getting off paper going to electronic records. Way outweigh any potential risks we might have from a security perspective," said Kupor when asked about any security concerns the physical copies presented.

Kupor argued that government innovation is key to reducing costs for taxpayers.

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"I think the president has done and told us is take the skills that you have around innovation and creative thinking and apply that to modernization for the government and if we do that, we'll not only improve the quality of service, but that is where we get efficiency," said Kupor.

"That's how we actually deliver more for the American people without constantly going to have to go back to the till and ask Congress for more money."