After decades of relying on paper files, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has officially ended its paper-based retirement processing system for most federal employees. On June 30th, OPM marked what it called the “Last Day of Paper,” signaling the beginning of a fully digital process for handling federal retirement applications.
OPM serves as the federal government’s human resources agency, managing personnel policies, employee benefits, and retirement systems for millions of civilian federal employees and retirees. Even as digital technology became standard across much of government, the agency continued processing approximately 100,000 retirement applications each year using paper records. The outdated system often resulted in lengthy delays, with retirements sometimes taking months to complete. In some cases, something as minor as a missing signature could delay processing by several days or even weeks.
For more than 60 years, retirement records were physically mailed between federal agencies before arriving at OPM’s Retirement Operations Center in Boyers, Pennsylvania. The facility is located about an hour outside Pittsburgh and is built 220 feet underground inside a former limestone mine operated by Iron Mountain. The mine’s naturally cool, climate-controlled environment made it an ideal location for storing sensitive government records when the system was established back in 1960.
Today, the underground facility contains more than 400 million individual paper records housed in roughly 26,000 filing cabinets. Shelves, tables, and workstations throughout the warehouse-like space are filled with cardboard boxes, manila folders, and paper documents that have traditionally been moved by hand from one processing station to another. For decades, employees manually handled around 10,000 retirement applications every month using these physical records.
Digitizing Federal Retirement Processing
Although multiple efforts had been made over the years to digitize the retirement system, none achieved lasting success. The process remained slow, complex, and heavily dependent on paper despite repeated modernization attempts.
Renewed momentum came earlier this year after the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, identified the retirement system as a prime candidate for modernization. In February, under DOGE’s direction, OPM employees completed the agency’s first fully digital retirement application without using any paper documents. The team had been given one week to complete the process, but finished it in only two days.
That successful test demonstrated that a fully electronic retirement process was achievable, and helped convince agency leadership that the broader transition could finally become a reality. According to OPM officials, it served as proof that the decades-old paper system could be replaced with a digital workflow capable of handling retirement applications at scale. Earlier digitization attempts had repeatedly failed to gain traction because the process was so slow and difficult. But this success acted as both a proof of concept and a rallying point for the modernization effort.
Matt MacIsaac, who oversees the day-to-day operations of OPM’s Boyers facility, said he was initially surprised when Elon Musk mentioned the underground mine during an Oval Office discussion about government modernization, but that he supported the effort to replace the outdated paper-based process with a modern digital system.
Benefits of the Change
OPM officials believe the transition to electronic records will dramatically improve efficiency by reducing processing times and eliminating many of the delays associated with transporting and handling paper files. They also said the operational benefits of digitization outweigh potential cybersecurity concerns.
Commenting on the change, Musk told Fox News Digital that employees will no longer have to wait months for paperwork to be processed in the underground archive before their retirements can be finalized. Instead, they will be able to retire much closer to their intended retirement dates.
Although retirement processing is moving to a digital platform, the underground Boyers facility is not closing. Approximately 450 OPM employees will continue working at the site, which will remain an important records storage location and secure government data center. The millions of paper records already stored inside the mine will remain there.
The agency’s long-term goal is to ensure that no new paper retirement files are added to the underground archive, and that existing paper records no longer need to leave the mine for processing. While the historic facility and its archives will continue to exist, future federal retirement applications are expected to move through an entirely electronic system from beginning to end.