Some of the explanation can be found here, in this baroque underground bureaucracy.ĭuring 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. In many places, however, these federal systems still don’t work well. “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works,” Obama said in his first inaugural address. In theory, these are problems everybody wants to fix. Obama took office with the hope that these hang-ups could be separated from Washington’s endless wars over the size of government. The Department of Veterans Affairs had trouble with an online records system and, while they struggled with it, accumulated so much paperwork in one office that auditors feared the floor might collapse. The rollout of, of course, was ruined by glitches in the Web site, but there are other examples: The Census Bureau had a failed experiment with hand-held computers, then reverted to paper, which cost up to $3 billion extra. In other places, what breaks is the government’s technology. In New Jersey, for instance, one researcher found that the approval process for a bridge project dragged on for years, in part because officials were required to do a historic survey of all buildings within two miles and to seek comment from Indian tribes as far away as Oklahoma. In some cases, the breaking point is caused by a vague or overcomplicated law. “That crazy cave,” said Aneesh Chopra, who served as President Obama’s chief technology officer.īut the mine is real, and the process inside it belongs to a stubborn class of government problem: old breaking points, built-in mistakes that require vital bureaucracies to waste money and busy workers to waste time.
#CIVILIAN OPM PERSONNEL FILES FULL#
The existence of a mine full of federal paperwork is not well known: Even within the federal workforce, it is often treated as an urban legend, mythic and half-believed. Morrison was told the system still relies on paper files. In a telephone interview this year, Morrison recalled his horror upon learning that the system was all run on paper: “After a year, I thought, ‘God, my reputation will be ruined if we don’t fix this,’ ” he said. Morrison Jr., who oversaw the retirement-processing system under President Ronald Reagan. “The need for automation was clear - in 1981,” said James W. Held up by all that paper, work in the mine runs as slowly now as it did in 1977. This odd place is an example of how hard it is to get a time-wasting bug out of a big bureaucratic system. The old mine’s tunnels have room for more than 28,000 file cabinets of paper records. They work underground not for secrecy but for space. The employees here pass thousands of case files from cavern to cavern and then key in retirees’ personal data, one line at a time.
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