Michael Scott of The Office fame didn’t create the extant federal retirement process that has been operated since 1960 in an underground mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania but he would have been its biggest cheerleader.

A prescient student once asked Scott, “Sir, as a company that primarily distributes paper, how have you adapted your business model to function in an increasingly paperless world?” Without skipping a beat, Scott retorted, “We can’t overestimate the value of computers. Yes, they are great for playing games and forwarding funny emails, but real business is done on paper. Okay?”

This episode aired in 2007 – weeks after Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone. Scott was undoubtedly wrong back then about the “real” uses of computers and paper; the intervening nearly 20 years have done nothing to help his cause.

But, despite that, we at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) have been acolytes of Michael Scott’s paper religion for over fifty years. Since 2007 OPM has processed about two million federal retirement applications the old-fashioned way – having applicants hand complete paper applications with their respective HR departments for manual review before being mailed to the agency’s payroll provider for manual review before ultimately showing up via mail at the Boyers mine.

Oh, and by the way, because we have OPM retirement system employees in both Boyers and in our DC headquarters, we have had a courier that makes multiple trips between the two operations weekly to hand-deliver the paper to the appropriate office! We have single-handedly kept the fictional Dunder Mifflin in business for all these years.

Not for lack of trying.

Actually, one early OPM attempt to modernize the process started just months after Michael Scott’s prognostication. Called “RetireEZ,” the effort kicked off in early 2008, was suspended a few months later and ultimately abandoned before the end of 2008. Several attempts to resuscitate RetireEZ were made over the years before the final nail was placed in its coffin in 2011. And over the past 15 years, there have been numerous additional attempts – all ending in failure.

That’s what makes today – June 30, 2026 – even more special. We no longer worship at the altar of Michael Scott. Instead, today marks the “Last Day of Paper” (LDOP) at the mine.

How did we get here?

At the beginning of this Trump Administration, we stood up a small, but mighty engineering development and design team (led by Joe Gebbia, who is now the US Chief Design Officer) to re-imagine what retirement should look like in the modern era. The result was the complete re-boot of the Online Retirement Application (ORA), whose development and adoption had stalled under the prior administration.

We didn’t go into a black hole for 12-18 months and try to boil the ocean; rather, the team did what all great software developers and designers do: Create an MVP, iterate on customer feedback, and continuously release improvements as we learned the real-world use cases of our customers.

In May of last year, we started with about 500 retirements via ORA. Today, we have handled more than 155,000 applications. That’s hyper-growth tantamount to what some of the greatest technology startups of all times have achieved – and this is the federal government!

Along the way, we demonstrated the enormous value of ORA.

For the first time, each of the players in the retirement ecosystem (retiree, agency HR department, agency payroll provider, and OPM) is working with the same electronic record. This enables us to operate more efficiently and with greater visibility into where bottlenecks may arise. Most importantly, we have demonstrated that ORA enables us to fully adjudicate retirement applications in less than half of the time it takes for paper-based applications. And we are just starting.

So, what does LDOP really mean?

As of today, more than 95% of all retirement applications will be fully electronic (the only exceptions are some smaller intelligence organizations that have different confidentiality requirements). This means – no more paper – period!

But it also means we have completely re-designed the retirement process from first principles based on our learnings.

Historically, the retirement process was linear: the retiree would complete their application, followed by the HR department, followed by the payroll department. Depending on the speed and complexity of the application, the linear process could easily add 45-90 days of incremental wait time before OPM would even receive the application and before a retiree would receive any of her pension payment. And if the application that OPM received ultimately required further “development” because it was missing critical elements, this could add a further 30-60 days of wait time. Understandably, this has caused enormous hardship for individuals who are used to getting a paycheck as an employee and now need to survive on savings until OPM even starts the adjudication process.

No longer. We are making two major changes to better serve our customers.

First, today OPM is releasing the MVP of its pre-retirement tool (Retire Ready). In addition to enabling current federal employees to scenario plan and determine when they would like to seek retirement, the pre-retirement application allows employees to partner with their HR departments well in advance of their retirement separation date to complete their full application. This means we can eliminate the time that many applicants spend waiting for their HR departments to finalize a pending application. Now, OPM should receive complete retirement packages literally on the day of the employee’s physical retirement. No more delays.

Second, because of the additional feature development work that our team has done, we will also begin processing a retiree’s application even before we have received the final payroll-related information from their agency payroll provider. Previously, waiting for the payroll information often consumed 30-45 days post-retirement date, again impacting a retiree’s ability to get their pension payments.

Our commitment to retirees post-LDOP is very simple and transformative: If you and your HR department get us a complete retirement application by your actual retirement separation date, we will approve a first retirement check within seven days! The new pre-retirement application is designed to make that possible earlier and more consistently. For applicants who meet Instant Retirement criteria, approval may be immediate! And once we receive the final payroll information from the payroll provider, to the extent there is any difference between the amount we calculated on your first retirement check and the updated information, we will correct that to ensure you get every last penny to which you are entitled.

But wait, there’s more.

Solving the retirement application process is only the first part of our transformation.

Next up is our customer contact center. As with the paper retirement process, we have not invested in modernization in this area pretty much since interactive voice response went mainstream in the early 1990s. As a result, many of our customers struggle to get through to our call center agents in a timely fashion. In peak times, we typically can handle fewer than one in four incoming calls. That’s not a good customer experience.

In the last few months, we’ve invested in creating more self-service options, so customers no longer need to pick up the phone to handle the most common issues. For example, customers can now go to Retirement Services Online to do the following: receive annuity statements and 1099-R forms; complete direct deposit changes and life insurance forms; update tax withholdings and contact information; report the death of an annuitant and missing payments.

That’s only a start.

More significantly, we kicked off a development project in March to completely modernize our call center technology. We have already developed an MVP of Annuitant 360, our version of an annuitant CRM that enables us to better track a customer’s engagement with us and to more quickly solve their problems by putting more tools into the hands of our call center agents.

Before the end of the fiscal year, we will release the first ever (as best as we know) AI-enabled government customer support application. The first use case for this will be to introduce AI agents into our phone system so customers can call 24/7 and get resolution on many issues that would have previously required them to speak with a live agent. We also plan to introduce AI-enabled chatbots in the near future to further enhance the convenience and speed of self-service problem resolution.

We have also recently kicked off a full digitization project to convert the 400 million pieces of paper (yes, you read that right) that live in the mine into digital documents. Previous efforts to do this have been cost- and time-prohibitive: estimates as high as $200 million over the course of five to ten years! With the benefit of our team’s critical thinking, we now expect to be able to digitize the entire mine for a fraction of that number in as short as a few years.

Why does this matter? Because our ability to service our customers is directly impacted by the presence of paper files. Believe it or not, but we actually have “runners” who work in the mine to grab paper files and bring them to our adjudicators when they receive a customer inquiry. Electronic records will reduce valuable time from problem resolution and make it seamless for multiple parties to access needed documents in support of a customer.

And, yes, there is still more to do.

Each of these initiatives is critically important to better serving our customers; they are necessary, but not sufficient. In the near future, we will kick off another initiative to re-design and modernize the complete post-retirement process. Most of our technological efforts to date have been focused on getting our customers to a successful retirement, but there is much to be done now with how we can better streamline our post-retirement actions. More to come on this shortly.

Putting Dunder Mifflin out of business was never on my bingo card when I thought about taking on the OPM Director job. But, while Michael Scott may be aghast at his future business prospects, I’d like to think that he’d at least give the OPM Retirement Services team a complimentary tip of his cap.