Ember Duke | layout editor

Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency set their sights on a limestone mine, Iron Mountain, in Boyers, Pa., about an hour from campus, which stores federal retirement files, original copies of famous music, print archives of historical photography and much more.

On Feb. 11, Musk said in a press conference in the Oval Office that it was inefficient to store physical copies of the federal filings at the mine and the rate at which federal employees could retire is dependent on the speed of the mine’s elevator shaft. Musk’s comments come amidst his DOGE initiatives to reduce government size and spending.

“Instead of working in a mine shaft and carrying manila envelopes to boxes in a mine shaft, you could do practically anything else,” he said to the room of reporters.

Fawn Todd worked for several years for a contractor at the mine. Though she never worked directly in the federal filing room, she said she doesn’t believe it’s the file storage preventing retirement from being processed.

“There’s no conveyor belt or elevator or anything like that. I’m not sure what he was referring to,” Todd said.

B. Guy Peters, a Maurice Falk professor of government at the University of Pittsburgh, said the storage method is inefficient in many ways, but the Office of Personnel Management needs a stable place to store the records in the meantime before they digitize them. Iron Mountain claims to be a climate controlled, stable environment that protects records from physical damage, according to their website.

“This mountain is as good a place as any to store them to secure,” Peters said. “You simply … have to duplicate it, do the paper record, and then there’s the electronic record. And then once the electronic system got running … even then, you might want to keep the backup, because there’s always the danger of losing the record somehow.”

In the first month of President Donald Trump’s second presidential term, DOGE has cut funding for USAID and other federal agencies, fired a slew of federal employees, canceled DEI contracts and accessed the data of several federal agencies.

While there has been some public backlash to some of Musk’s choices, Clifford Bob, professor of political science at Duquesne University, said similar budget cuts are common in most administrations. What is unusual about this one is Musk’s public figure, the speed at which the budget cuts are occurring and the publicity surrounding DOGE.

“Everything that I have seen at the moment suggests that Musk is working for Trump in the executive branch, and that that’s not very different from the way things have happened in the past,” Bob said.

Fourteen states filed a joint lawsuit against him arguing that the power he is exercising is unlawful of his position as an unelected advisor. On Feb. 18, U.S. district Judge Tanya Chutkan denied an immediate request to halt Musk from accessing date and firing federal employees, but said the suit “legitimately call (s)into question what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight,” according to Reuters.

Peters said the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was put into place as a protection for the federal budget and states that the executive branch does not have the authority to impound funds which have been appropriated for spending by Congress. The Trump administration has decided that the executive branch should have power to slash funds at their discretion, according to PBS.

“The public sector and private sector work differently,” Peters said. “When you bring in people from outside, as Musk has been doing, they typically don’t really understand the processes, the protections that have to be built in on civil rights, etc.”

Peters said DOGE is cutting from small percentages of the government budget instead of cutting from programs like Social Security and Medicaid which make up the bulk of the spending.

“If you want to, in fact, to balance the budget and cut spending, you have to go after the most popular programs which nobody is going to like,” he said.

Bob said DOGE has an opportunity to be revolutionary, especially if it progresses to addressing some of the larger government expenditures.

“The Department of Defense and military spending is notorious as one of the hugest sinkholes in the country for taxpayer money,” he said. “I believe that DOGE is going to move on to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, which have had decades of failed audits.”