Trump administration says it ended decades of paper-based federal retirement processing at a Boyers, Pennsylvania mine

The Trump administration says it has shut down a long-running, paper-based federal retirement-processing operation housed in a limestone mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania, ending a system that officials described as lasting for about 65 years. The effort, described in reporting tied to an administration internal initiative referred to as “DOGE,” is said to have moved the work away from the underground facility that for decades handled retirement-related documentation in hard-copy form.

The facility at the center of the change is located roughly 230 feet below the surface in Boyers, PA, according to the report. The administration characterizes the mine location as part of what it calls a decades-old bureaucratic setup that relied on paper workflows, contrasting it with what it says is a modernized approach to processing federal retirement information.

According to the Fox News Politics report published July 1, the administration’s stated objective was to replace the underground, paper-dependent process with a different method for processing federal retirement materials. The report describes the mine as having functioned as a processing site for decades, and it frames the administration’s action as an effort to reduce dependence on paper systems and update the handling of records used in federal retirement administration.

The reporting describes the shift as an operational and logistical change rather than a single legislative action, with the administration presenting it as the end of a workflow it says had persisted for generations. As with many administration modernization efforts, the practical effect depends on what systems and procedures take the place of the prior method, including how retirement documentation is transferred, validated, and stored going forward. Those process details were not fully enumerated in the available packet.

The retirement system in the federal government involves multiple agencies and contractors, and changes to processing workflows can raise questions about operational continuity, records retention, privacy protections, and the timeline for affected cases. The report does not, in the supplied record, specify how quickly all retirement-related paper would be fully phased out, nor does it provide granular information on which stages of retirement processing were tied to the mine location.

For now, the core reported fact is that the administration says it has ended paper-based processing at the Boyers mine and that the change represents the conclusion of a roughly 65-year arrangement. If additional public documentation is released, such as agency statements describing the timeline, the new workflow, and where records are processed and stored, that would help confirm the scope of the operational transition and how it is managed for ongoing retirement claims and administrative actions.