By Scott Kupor, Director, U.S. Office of Personnel Management

September 19, 2025

Today, I want to take you two hundred and thirty feet underground into the former limestone mine that has processed federal retirement paperwork for decades (the Retirement Operations Centers in Boyers, Pennsylvania, or ROC for the cool kids) to share why it’s a symbol of the challenges we face across government, and to discuss how we’re working to modernize key aspects of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

The Boyers facility, located in rural Butler County (you may recall that Butler County was the scene of the tragic attempt on then-Candidate Trump’s life during the 2024 election), about an hour north of Pittsburgh, is unique to say the least. Housed in a cavernous, former limestone mine, it’s a place where 600 dedicated federal employees process thousands of retirement claims every month—by hand, on paper, in a system that feels like a time capsule from the 1970s. [By the way, OPM is not the only customer of the mine. The mine is practically like its own fully contained city, with golf carts as the preferred mode of transportation.]

Originally excavated in 1902 by U.S. Steel, the mine was repurposed in the 1960s for secure document storage due to its cool, stable climate and natural protection from external threats. Retirement operations were added to the mine in the early 1970s. Today, the mine houses about 26,000 file cabinets filled with manilla envelopes, cardboard boxes, and about 400 million pieces of paper, a true testament to the scale and complexity of federal retirement processing.

The OPM employees who work in the mine are great. They handle sensitive retirement claims with care, ensuring federal employees receive the benefits they’ve earned. However, the process, which can take well over a month, is slow, prone to errors, and heavily reliant on manual labor.

Why does this matter? Because the Boyers mine is a microcosm of a bigger, more endemic challenge within the federal government: outdated systems and processes that have not kept up with modern technology and that lag in terms of operational efficiency. To be clear, this is a leadership and an organizational systems problem, not a people problem. Simply put, these employees have been failed by a system that prioritizes adding more budget and more headcount as a stopgap fix to a problem that demands reinvention and new thinking. 

Past attempts at modernization – three separate initiatives in each of the 1980s, ‘90s and ‘00s, together costing taxpayers an estimated $130 million – have failed, leaving us with paper-based processes that are inefficient and costly. Why did these efforts fail? There are no simple answers, but the proposed solutions didn’t address the core issues. Instead, the workplan focused on digitizing (a fancy way to say “scanning”) hundreds of millions of existing documents, without reforming the overall retirement process with a modern, tech-forward solution.

Why is the retirement problem so complicated? Well, there are a number of reasons.

First, until recently prospective retirees filed their retirement paperwork on paper. Yes, on actual paper. That paper application was then routed – by mail – to the retiree’s HR departments for the agencies for which they worked over their career and then again – by mail – to the respective payroll providers who own that retiree’s compensation records. And, then a giant palette comprising the completed application gets shipped – yes, you guessed it – by mail to the Boyers facility.

Second, the US government lacks what most every other HR organization has – a single, canonical record of the employment history of its people. We estimate the federal government has more than 115 separate HR IT systems (for which taxpayers spend about $2 billion per year), very few of which actually talk to one another. As a result, if I am a typical federal employee who has worked at various agencies across my career, the retirement application is the first time in my 30+ year career that the government is attempting to assemble my full employment and payroll history – by pen and paper.

Third, many retirements themselves are complex. Sometimes people have borrowed against their retirement (which needs to be factored into their projected annuity payment amount), sometimes people are divorced and the state in which they were divorced requires that OPM collect a notarized court document reflecting the agreed-upon resolution of retirement assets, sometimes people have medical disabilities that impact their retirement and thus require a full review of all medical records, etc. These are not trivial complications and are often subject to timelines outside of OPM’s control.    

But all hope is not lost! We at OPM are committed to transforming how we serve federal employees – higher quality, faster resolution times, and enhanced efficiency.

We’ve already begun tackling the first problem above – the front-end of the retirement process. Under the leadership of Joe Gebbia, the Airbnb co-founder who was recently appointed by President Trump to be the first U.S. Chief Design Officer, we hope never to see another piece of retirement application paperwork enter the mine. Stay tuned for more exciting updates on this! And then is an enormous amount of technology work also underway on the other two big areas. We are well on our way to a fully electronic world – yes, I realize that sounds very unimpressive in 2025, but trust me, this is a 50-year problem of epic proportions.

More significantly, the Boyers mine is but one of many examples of opportunities for modernization across the federal government. None of these challenges are rocket science – maybe with the exception of our friends at NASA – but they have been plagued for too long by a system that doesn’t demand inventiveness and efficiency as first-class citizens in the government vernacular. OPM aims to create fluency in this new language – and we are starting with one retirement piece of paper at a time.