Federal Workers in Limestone Mine Bash Elon Musk’s Claims About How They Handle Documents: ‘Not True…There’s No Elevator’
Federal workers working in the limestone mine responsible for handling government retirements pushed back against Elon Musk’s claims of efficiency.
Earlier this month, Musk told reporters inside the Oval Office that DOGE was investigating a limestone mine in Butler County, Pennsylvania for allegedly manually processing retirements for federal workers sometimes over the course of months. He also claimed that if an elevator breaks down then “no one can retire” while adding, “The most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000.”
“It’s like a time warp, and the elevator breaks down and sometimes — and then nobody can retire,” Musk told reporters. “You could do practically anything else, and you would add to the the goods and services of the United States in a more useful way.”
However, five current workers and one former supervisor from the mine spoke anonymously to CNN’s Gabe Cohen and said some of Musk’s claims are not accurate.
“There’s no elevator. No elevator at all. You walk down into the mine. It looks like any other office building,” one anonymous current government employee told CNN.
Regarding Musk’s claim about the most number of workers who can retire in a month, all the workers confirmed there is “no limit” to the amount of monthly retirements with one worker adding, “I’m not sure where that number came from.”
The billionaire Tesla CEO also claimed that all the paperwork to process retirements is handled manually from inside the limestone mine. Once again, an anonymous worker in the mine dismissed Musk’s allegations by telling Cohen, “That is not true. It’s not.”
As previously reported, the underground office dates back to the late 1950s when the federal government was searching for additional storage space before becoming aware of the abandoned mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania. The complex is owned and leased by the document company Iron Mountain, which allows leases near the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) offices.
Watch the clip above via CNN.
