I recently learned that the U.S. government's retirement paperwork for federal employees is processed in a limestone mine built in the 1950s. It's quite astonishing that the process relies on manual labor, with over 700 workers operating 230 feet underground to handle around 10,000 applications each month. The paperwork is stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes, and the entire retirement process can take several months. The speed of retiring federal employees is limited by the elevator shaft used to transport the paperwork.
π¨BREAKING: Elon Musk says that there is a literal limestone mine where they store all the US Government's retirement paperwork built in 1950 that they need to go up and down every time they want to retire someone from Federal Government. The speed in which they can retire people is limited by the speed of the elevator shaft. Yes, actually.
Video Transcript AI Summary
We're streamlining the federal bureaucracy, aiming to reduce the workforce. We found a surprising bottleneck: the retirement process. Currently, the maximum number of retirements per month is capped at 10,000 due to a completely manual, paper-based system. The paperwork is stored in a 1950s-era limestone mine, and the speed of the mine shaft elevator limits processing. This antiquated system employs thousands of people whose efforts could be far better utilized elsewhere. The situation is absurd; we need to modernize this process immediately. Imagine the increased efficiency and contribution to the country's goods and services if these employees were redeployed.
Speaker 0: You know, one of the things is, like, we're we we are trying to sort of right size the the federal bureaucracy just to make sure that this obviously, need to there needs to be a lot of people working for federal government, but not as many as currently. So we're saying, well, okay. Well, let's if if people can retire, you know, with full benefit benefits and everything, that that would be good. They can retire, get their retirement payments, everything. And then we were told this is actually, I think, a great anecdote, because we were told the the the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000.
We're like, well, why why is that? Well, because all the all the retirement paperwork is manual on paper. It's manually calculated, then written down on a piece of paper, then it goes down a mine. And, like, what do you mean a mine? Like, yeah.
There's a limestone mine where we store all the retirement paperwork that look and you look at picture of this at a picture of this mine, we'll post some pictures afterwards. And this this mine looks like something out of the fifties because it was started in 1955. So it looks like it's like a time warp. And then the the speed the the limiting factor is the speed at which the mine shaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal federal government. And the elevator breaks down and then sometimes, and then you can't nobody can retire.
Doesn't that sound crazy? There's like a thousand people that work on this. So I think if if we take those people and say, like, you know what? Instead of working in a in a mine shaft in, carrying Manila envelopes to, you know, boxes in a mine shaft, you could do practically anything else. And you you would add to the the goods and services of The United States, in in a more useful way.
Yes, the retirement paperwork for federal employees is processed in a limestone mine from the 1950s.
This is why we need @DOGE. https://t.co/QwPK9X8I4b
Federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania. 700+ mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process ~10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes. The retirement process takes multiple months.
