In the fall of 2019, I toured the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) Retirement Operations Center—known as the “ROC”—located 220 feet underground in a former limestone mine north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Federal employees work daily in this subterranean space lined with rugged silver-painted stone walls and floors packed with 22,000 file cabinets stacked 10 high. These cabinets contain 400 million civilian retirement records and have long symbolized the government’s reliance on paper-based processing. That is finally starting to change.
As noted in a previous article, the move toward electronic retirement processing has been linked to the rise of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but OPM has been working on retirement system modernization for years. After piloting the Online Retirement Application (ORA) in 2024, the agency has now rolled it out governmentwide. All new retirement applications must be submitted electronically.
In OPM’s Information Technology Strategic Plan for 2023–2026, former Chief Information Officer Guy Cavallo prioritized modernization initiatives including Electronic Retirement Records (ERR), ORA, and RS Surveys. While Cavallo retired earlier this year, those efforts are now reaching employees preparing to retire in 2025.
