After decades of using paper files, the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has officially discontinued its paper-based retirement processing system for most federal employees. On June 30th, OPM announced the “Last Day of Paper,” signaling the start of a fully digital process for handling federal retirement applications.
OPM is the federal government’s human resources agency, overseeing personnel policies, employee benefits, and retirement plans for millions of civilian federal employees and retirees. Even as digital technology became more widely used in government, the agency continued to process approximately 100,000 retirement applications on paper each year. The outdated system frequently caused lengthy delays, with retirements taking months to complete. In some cases, something as minor as a missing signature can cause a delay of several days or weeks.
For more than 60 years, retirement records were physically mailed from federal agencies to OPM’s Retirement Operations Center in Boyers, Pennsylvania. The facility is located about an hour outside Pittsburgh and is housed 220 feet underground in 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 in 1960.
Today, the underground facility contains over 400 million individual paper records stored in approximately 26,000 filing cabinets. Shelves, tables, and workstations throughout the warehouse-like space are stacked with cardboard boxes, manila folders, and paper documents that were previously moved by hand from one processing station to another. For decades, employees manually processed approximately 10,000 retirement applications per month using these physical records.
Digitizing Federal Retirement Processing
Despite numerous efforts over the years to digitize the retirement system, none were successful; the process remained slow, complex, and heavily reliant on paper.
Renewed momentum came earlier this year when the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, identified the retirement system as a top candidate for modernization. In February, OPM employees completed the agency’s first fully digital retirement application without using any paper documents, as directed by DOGE. The team was given one week to complete the process, but they finished it in just two days.
That successful test demonstrated that a fully electronic retirement process was possible, which helped persuade agency leadership that the larger transition could finally be realized. According to OPM officials, it demonstrated that the decades-old paper system could be replaced with a digital workflow capable of managing large-scale retirement applications. Earlier digitization attempts had repeatedly failed due to the process’s slowness and difficulty. However, this success served as both a proof of concept and a rallying point for the modernization effort.
Matt MacIsaac, who oversees day-to-day operations at OPM’s Boyers facility, said he was surprised when Elon Musk mentioned the underground mine during an Oval Office discussion about government modernization, but he supported the effort to replace the outdated paper-based process with a modern digital system.
Benefits of the Change
OPM officials believe that moving to electronic records will significantly improve efficiency by shortening processing times and eliminating many of the delays associated with transporting and handling paper files. They also stated that the operational benefits of digitization outweigh the potential cybersecurity risks.
Musk commented on the change, telling Fox News Digital that employees will no longer have to wait months for paperwork to be processed in the underground archive before their retirements are finalized. Instead, they will be able to retire much closer to their desired retirement dates.
Although retirement processing is moving to a digital platform, the underground Boyers facility will remain open. 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.