You may have heard that the US government is inefficient. Well, this is how the federal government processes retirement papers for federal employees, and takes inefficiency to a whole different level.
From 2014: Sinkhole of Bureaucracy https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/03/22/sinkhole-of-bureaucracy/
Here, 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…
Held up by all that paper, work in the mine runs as slowly now as it did in 1977. “The need for automation was clear — in 1981,” said James W. Morrison Jr., who oversaw the retirement-processing system under President Ronald Reagan…
The staff working in the mine has increased by at least 200 people in the past five years. And the cost of processing each claim has increased from $82 to $108…
So this begs the question, why has this persisted? Unless there is something missing from what we know, why have multiple Congresses, Senates, and 3 different POTUS not done anything about this prior?
I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the article - but it seems crazy on the face of it that no one has cared about this for at least the last 10 years. Makes me think some aspect of this story is missing.
Edit: article behind paywall so can’t read it.
Edit #2: I found the story at another site and found something astonishing. My company also uses (or least used to) Iron Mountain for paper storage. No idea if they use the same site/facility.
Still able to determine why this has persisted for decades. I know for my company, we have records retention rules for past paper docs, but we now keep that stuff in electronic format. Old paper docs were still required to be maintained and shipped out to Iron Mountain years ago.
Yes, it seems crazy. But some things become cemented because “that is the way we do things”.
I have commented before, on Radio Shack management’s refusal to even acknowledge, let alone respond, to the change in the competitive environment in the late 80s.
I may have commented before, on the pump seal company’s core product. Their core seal design, of the late 70s, was the same design they had been using since the 40s. It was very inefficient in it’s use of material and machining time. Competitors were introducing seals that were much more efficient in usage of material and machining time, hence, they cost less. So what was the company’s response to losing jobs because their prices were too high? They always attributed jobs lost to nefarious activities by the companies that won the jobs.
That, but the more I think about it (and have yet to find data to support this hypothesis), it would not surprise me that Congress has been unwilling to pay for improvements - much like they were not willing to pay to improve the IRS.
We probably still do it this way because of Congressional opposition to paying to do it otherwise.
I wonder if there is an old story out there where someone suggested it be changed but the plan to pay for it did not make it out of committee. If so, someone will probably find such.
One of Tim’s sea stories fits in this thread. He was at a US base in Greenland, Iceland, I forget exactly. The point was, every evening, an Airman came into the barracks Tim was in, to spray for the gigantic roaches that infested the barracks. Someone commented to the Airman the spray didn’t seem very effective. The Airman replied that the roaches had become immune to that insecticide years earlier, but no-one ever changed the standing orders. So the Air Force continued to buy that insecticide, and spray it around, every day, even though they knew it was useless.
During the past 30 years, administrations have spent more than $100 million trying to automate the old-fashioned process in the mine and make it run at the speed of computers.
They couldn’t.
So now the mine continues to run at the speed of human fingers and feet. That failure imposes costs on federal retirees, who have to wait months for their full benefit checks. And it has imposed costs on the taxpayer: The Obama administration has now made the mine run faster, but mainly by paying for more fingers and feet.
Hawkwin
Who will bet that this Congress will be unwilling to spend the millions it will require to automate this process.
Here’s another article, from 2019. Should be paywall free.
What’s on your bucket list? Some people want to visit the Taj Mahal, float along the canals of Venice in a gondola or hike to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro. All of those experiences sound wonderful, but I also have long had a more mundane item on my list: touring the Retirement Operations Center of the Office of Personnel Management in Boyers, Pennsylvania…
By 1950, mining operations had ceased and the company began using the caverns it had created to protect corporate records. By 1954, space was being rented to businesses and the U.S. government for records storage. In 1960, federal retirement operations moved from the Pension Building (now the National Building Museum) in Washington to Boyers. Today, the space is owned by Iron Mountain, a data and records management company.
In 1960, the facility had 30,000 square feet of dedicated storage space with 42 employees mostly working in jobs related to file storage. Today, there is 221,000 square feet of space with more than 500 employees…
On our tour, we learned of many recent changes to improve the efficiency of the tedious process of retirement claims adjudication and responding to various other requests related to retirement benefits. Training sessions were underway in many areas we visited and retirement records were being maintained in an orderly and secure manner.
We returned from our trip with a renewed sense of optimism that federal employees’ retirement benefits are in good hands.
If automating it is cheaper (am I am sure it is) why wouldn’t some largish computer company offer to do it for, say, $80 per claim processed? It would be a bonanza for the company, and a savings for the government, and perhaps some sort of “buyout” could be arranged after 10 years worth of contract, or whatever.
I have no idea how to pencil the math, but if it’s cheaper, then it’s cheaper. If it’s not, then it’s not.
600 employees. Lets say you cut that to 10 employees with automation.
How much of a savings is that? We are running a deficit of $1.8 trillion.
Most of the budget is the pentagon, SS, and Medicare.
Musk said something about 456 or so agencies. According to Musk we only need perhaps 99 agencies. AGAIN most of the budget is the Pentagon, SS and Medicare. Where is the big savings?
The new budget proposal would cut $150 billion. It would eventually cut $200. We are talking per year out of $4.75 trillion.
Goody. But so what?
MIT needs $30 million for infrastructure. That $30 million to the US economy supports some part of a $1 tr or more in economic output. It supports the Pentagon in huge ways.
The studies on education costs what? Minor. The studies/research looks at things like the kids who went through the pandemic getting tutoring. It makes education more efficient. Regardless of the lines of crap out of DOGE. Now we are blind on how to make education better.
I’d guess the hurdle is the upfront cost of getting everything into an electronic system. You can set something up relatively cheaply, but then you’d have to get all of the hard copy documents entered. Sounds like there’s a lot. Data entry, scanning, whatever…bazillions of pages would be very costly.
Is it aniquated? Yup! Will it cost a ton to do it the right way? Double yup!
Details matter. Musk is not detail oriented. He’s a smash and then try to fix stuff he broke kinda guy. That’s why we have tons of food spoiling in warehouses instead of being distributed to needy people around the world.