The mindset of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is now firmly embedded in agencies and departments across the federal government. Waste, fraud, and abuse are being detected and prevented at every turn.
A recent report issued by the Office of the Inspector General Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that that the federal employee retirement applications process, administered by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), is "fraught with IT management weaknesses" and not nearly enough has been done to fix it.
An initial, and shocking finding of DOGE was the Iron Mountain cave system where the entire federal retirement program was kept in paper taking months to process by hand any one individual’s retirement paperwork. 700+ mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process ~10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes.
OPM manages and administers the federal retirement program and the agency has been working on modernizing the process for more than 20 years with little progress. It was noted at the time that if this were a private company, they would have long since gone out of business.
The GAO report released that, "OPM has not yet demonstrated that it has incorporated key aspects of IT project management as part of its modernization effort, as we recommended. Doing so would help ensure that key aspects of the project, such as scope, responsible organizations, costs, schedules, and risks are identified and that progress toward meeting objectives, such as processing timeliness, can be assessed.”
The GAO said that legislation was enacted on July 4, 2025 that directed OPM to implement their recommendations. GAO estimated that OPM could save $1 billion after full implementing their recommendations.
Gene L. Dodaro, Comptroller General of the United States, wrote to the OPM Director saying, “GAO’s has 14 open priority recommendations. Additionally, there are 44 other GAO open recommendations that we will continue to work with your staff to address.”
Under ‘Actions needed' are common sense items such as:
- OPM needs to implement a monitoring mechanism to identify and remove ineligible family members from the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) program”.
- OPM needs to develop, document, and implement a Retirement Services IT modernization plan.
- OPM needs to establish and maintain a workforce planning process and assess competency needs and staffing.
- The Director of OPM should establish a time frame to develop a plan to manage permanent electronic records.
The GAO report also calls out areas of particularly high risk to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. One of the high-risk areas—strategic human capital management—directly centers on OPM. In addition, mission critical skills gaps are a factor in 20 of the other 37 areas currently listed as high-risk.
Weekly DOGE Contracts Update: In the last five days, agencies terminated 123 wasteful contacts with a ceiling value of $5.3B and savings of $4.2B, including an $857k Department of the Interior contract for a “technical advisor, Lagos Nigeria”.