Then how on Earth do the rest of us retire? I can confirm that tens of millions of people who have never worked for FedGov have nonetheless retired, grown old, and died without a problem, and without needing Iron Mountain to store their paper files.

Or at least on Iron Mountain. Or on some rocky crag on the Moon or Mars.

” in 1958, the U.S. government was in the market for storage space. It needed 30,000 square feet to hold personnel files that were being relocated from a building in Washington. Officials looked at buildings in Richmond, Va., and Syracuse, N.Y., before choosing this place, an underground complex where 1,000 workers had once cut limestone to feed the steel mills.

The government moved its old records here in 1960. At first, it was just a file room. Records were shipped to Washington for processing. But over time, the government began to hire more people to work in the mine itself.”

The rest is a quick read that answers many of your questions. Iron Mountain the company serves something like 60+ countries and thousands of customers in 1500+ facilities worldwide. Only a handful are underground. https://www.ironmountain.com/resources/landing-pages/i/iron-mountain-virtual-facility-tours

The Post does a good job of explaining what happens there, why it’s important to retirees, why it takes anywhere from 1 hr to several weeks to ensure each retiree’s record is complete and accurate.

The USG has spent $100’s of millions trying to marry and/or replace paper and computers with only marginal improvements. Some problems are hard. Contractors propose expensive solutions. Many dollars later contracts are cancelled and the process starts again with a new proposal and more dollars.

We can spend dollars to move the OPM retirement section above ground in leased or owned space and then spend more dollars for archival storage of whatever records they process but it’s unlikely to be cheaper and more effective than the abandoned mine the USG chose in 1958, but if it is let’s do it.

https://fxtwitter.com/cb_doge/status/1890120471032869151

Swisher is one of the leading deplatforming hacks

I would recommend that anything you read about DOGE, click through to the source material (if any) before believing it. An example is anything you read in the legacy media about what an executive order says or does. They have always lied about anything they didn’t like (e. g. “Don’t Say Gay” in Florida, which did none of the things they said it was going to do) , or liked a lot.

Nobody has really wanted to change it. Too many paychecks depend on keeping it as it is. There are fifty state governments who need to keep records, many comparable to an entire European nation in population, how many of them have hollowed-out mountains in which to do so? How many European nations have needed a hollowed-out mountain to keep their records in? (I will give you Switzerland, their National Redoubt hollowed out of the Alps probably has storage for government archives.)

One refreshing thing about the second Trump administration is the exposure of a lot of bullshit accepted as conventional wisdom.

Except maybe to chisel them off. Is there anything more Communist than sculpting a mountain into the image of our Great Leaders’ glorious heads? George Washington would have slapped Borglum into the ground for suggesting it. (And one of those heads is not like the others, little bit of recency bias there.)

Some delegates to the Constitutional Convention suggested “His Exalted Highness,” with others chiming in with the more democratic “His Elective Highness.” Other suggestions included the formal “Chief Magistrate” and the lengthy “His Highness the President of the United States of America, and Protector of Their Liberties.” The debate went on for multiple weeks…

Eventually the Senate agreed to the simplified version of their grandiose title, and Washington became President of the United States. “Happily the matter is now done with, I hope never to be revived,” Washington wrote at the conclusion of the ordeal.