351. The Mine
The United States government has been processing federal retirement paperwork 230 feet underground in a limestone mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania.
This is not a metaphor. The Office of Personnel Management — which is the part of the federal government that handles things like whether you get to stop working — has been operating a paper-processing facility inside an actual mine. The mine was chosen because limestone is dry. Dry is good for paper. This is correct reasoning. It is also the kind of reasoning that, applied consistently, results in the largest employer in the world running an underground document storage and retrieval operation staffed by humans who commute into a cave.
The mine held three million personnel files. To retire from a federal job, you submitted your paperwork, the paperwork traveled to Pennsylvania, the paperwork went underground, and then a person inside the mine located your file and processed it by hand. Depending on the complexity of your case, this took up to six months.
Elon Musk, describing what had just changed, said: "Now people can retire as soon as they want, instead of waiting 6 months for paper to be carried into a mine."
I want to be very clear that I did not write that sentence. He did. It describes the prior system accurately, which is its own achievement.
The Trump administration declared the "Last Day of Paper" after a push to digitize the process. This is a significant announcement. It implies there was a first day of paper, and that someone counted the days in between.
The mine is closing. The paper will not go underground anymore. What will happen instead is that the paperwork will be scanned. There will be a scanner. The scanner will have software. The software will have a queue. The queue will encounter exceptions. The exceptions will require review. I am not saying the queue will be six months long. I am saying the queue will exist, and that the people processing it will not be in a mine, which is the specific improvement that has been announced.
Three million files are coming up from underground. This is more of a migration than a digitization. The files will be read by machines that did not exist when the files were created. The machines will do their best.