A former limestone mine located north of Pittsburgh that now stores government paperwork may be the latest target of Elon Musk and DOGE.
An old Butler County limestone mine currently used to store government paperwork has drawn the attention of Elon Musk, the billionaire head of the new Department of Government Efficiency. The mine, operated and run by Iron Mountain and located in Cherry Township, is an optimal place to store old items, and has been used to house government documents by hand. For 50 years until 1952, the location was a functional limestone mine but is currently run by the Office of Personnel Management and handles retirement paperwork of government employees.
Storage provider Iron Mountain purchased the facility in 1998 and has since been leasing space to the federal government for the last 25 years. The facility takes in roughly 10,000 applications for retirement and is transported 230 feet below ground, where they are then processed by hand. According to the Department of Government Efficiency, the elevators used to send the documents to the mine will occasionally break down, which in turn prevents eligible employees from having their retirement requests processed.
Musk has been a supporter of aiming to have government employees retire with full benefits and says DOGE’s mission is to “right-size” federal bureaucracy. Musk took issue with the inefficiency of the retirement process and said that there were significantly better uses for the space, and that government retirements should not be limited by the number of requests that the 700-employee facility can handle. “Instead of working in a mineshaft,” Musk said. “You could do practically anything else, and you would add to the goods and services of the United States in a more useful way.”
The system can in some cases take up to several months to process all requests, and are done by hand using paper, manila folders. Musk described the process during an appearance with President Trump, who is preparing an executive order to increase Musk and DOGE’s cost-cutting abilities. There have been several past attempts to digitize the system, but all have failed, and the mine has fallen out of the news for the last decade. According to Fox News, previous efforts estimated costs higher than $130 million.
In a 2014 article from the Washington Post, the facility was described as a “sinkhole of bureaucracy”, and cost $56 million to fully operate at the time. DOGE posted pictures of the system to its official account on Elon Musk’s social media platform X. Since taking over the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has overseen different rounds of layoffs, including an attempt to dissolve USAID, a move that has since been challenged in court. Trump said he is prepared to increase Musk’s role to affordably modernize the U.S. government.
