The town of Boyers, PA hides an unshakable – and costly – legacy of government bureaucracy that has resisted attempts to downsize and automate it since it was set up in the 1960s.
inside the caverns of an old Pennsylvania limestone mine, there are 600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management. Their task is nothing top-secret. It is to process the retirement papers of the government’s own workers.
But that system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper.
The employees here pass thousands of case files from cavern to cavern and then key in retirees’ personal data, one line at a time. They work underground not for secrecy but for space. The old mine’s tunnels have room for more than 28,000 file cabinets of paper records.
This odd place is an example of how hard it is to get a time-wasting bug out of a big bureaucratic system.
Held up by all that paper, work in the mine runs as slowly now as it did in 1977.
After several attempts to modernize and automate the system, costing over $100 million, the OPM is substantially unchanged, charting an average waiting time of approximately 60 days to process the files concerning each government employee who submits for retirement.
The Office of Personnel Management is a great example of the many systems that allow complexity and expenses to multiply wildly when government becomes involved. Government is simply not set up – and was never intended by the founders – to have its fingers in many endeavors that the private sector handles efficiently and profitably. And for every additional, unnecessary federal system or program, like ObamaCare, for example, stresses and costs are multiplied in many wasteful, hidden ways.
Source: The Washington Post
Image: The Washington Post
This is more like a doomsday shelter. With all that paper that can be burned for fuel
Or to wipe your ass
Audit the FED and we’d all be billionaires with the reparations.
I look the old way.
ha its probably where they plan to send some of the elite when the disaster hits…it no doubt doesn’t look like that anymore. more like food stockpiles.
Russia has nothing over us!!! This country is managed by morons, that don’t give a $#%&!@*, except to their own!
we the people who, pays for these dont get to use them
I’m not sure I fully disagree with it. It’s good to have a electronic backups to your paper records but is also good to have paper records as backups to your electronic records, and all need to be stored in a safe (preferably separate) place…
Do you see the waste of your stolen tax dollars. And this is only a little tip of the massive ice burg of generated ignorance of the federal government.
Greg they just built what you are speaking of in Utah. It has an endless supply line.