This is absolutely bizarre. It sounds like something out of Portal

Are you telling me that the US Government is storing its data in a data storage facility?

https://www.ironmountain.com/services/vital-records-storage

When will this woke madness stop?

Read the article. It's not just data storage. Hundreds of people actually work there, processing the applications there, by hand, on paper.

The article says they couldn't confirm Musk's claims about the number of employees.

Snopes hasn't confirmed it in 2025 but they did say that in 2014 the Washington Post reported that 600 people worked there.

So 0.01% of the Federal workforce or so?

The facility website says they have roughly 1100 workers there daily, but those aren't all government since other work goes on there too.

Hers a PDF detailing some of the audio and photographic professionals that work "down the mine" in the state of the art digitisation facilities that corporations have there:

https://edge.sitecorecloud.io/ironmountain-c8dd68e9/media/pr...

So why would it be by definition considered waste that a government has employees working on paper records stored in the same place?

There is absolutely no reason to think this is ridiculous. These types of sites exist all over the world. Yet Elon Musk claims it's ridiculous and people now have to defend that claim?

Also why does it matter if it's in an underground ex-mining facility or a basement in Washington? It matters how much does this cost vs a modern computerized system. Instead the big brains over at X act like this is how the entire government works. They found maybe 1 or 2% of waste in USAID? "Shut it all down and lose all the experience and relations built over decades" they don't want efficiency. They want to slash and burn all government departments that aren't enriching billionaires.

Before Trump got involved and screwed up everyone's ability to think clearly, shutting down USAID would have been celebrated.

"Though better known for administering humanitarian aid around the world, USAID has a long history of engaging in intelligence work and meddling in the domestic politics of aid recipients. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the agency often partnered with the CIA’s now-shuttered Office of Public Safety, a department beset by allegations that it trained foreign police in "terror and torture techniques" and encouraged official brutality, according to a 1976 Government Accountability Office report."

Ancient history? No, in 2014, they were caught trying to create unrest in Cuba.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/04/03/cuban-twitter-and-other...

https://apnews.com/article/technology-cuba-united-states-gov...

Trump Derangement Syndrome is worse than Trump. I’m an immigrant from Bangladesh who is in the country because my dad got a job with USAID. In the Bush era, liberals would have been shocked if we found out USAID spent $29 million under Biden interfering with elections in Bangladesh. https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/foreign-affairs/3744.... Now you mention it and get some neocon nonsense about “American interests.” Truly disgusting.

You're taking the word of a liar as gospel truth, and you're attributing responses to "liberals" from nowhere. Which "liberals"?

It sounds like he knows personally what USAID did in Bangladesh.

I’m from Bangladesh and my dad worked his entire career for USAID contractors, since the 1980s. Many of our family friends are career USAID people. My dad can’t be sure but he strongly suspects Trump is correct. USAID was commonly used as a CIA/State Department front in the past. It became more professional in the 1990s, but according to him Samantha Powers heavily politicized the agency. And the US administration has been going crazy about third world countries aligning themselves with Russia.

Well, whats your point? All spy agencies including russian use similar movements to destabilize enemies, it was true during whole cold era. Is this somehow shocking to anybody?

US agencies did much worse things in pursue of eliminating communism, in US and elsewhere.

In the Obama era, you could have told an average liberal about it and they'd ignore it or apologize for it. It's not Trump Derangement Syndrome, it's just an artefact of substantial policy disagreements between parties in terms of foreign policy goals being low historically, and mass media minimizing imperialism.

People aren't just ignoring the imperialism; they're outraged that Trump is shutting it down.

Buying Greenland, annexing Canada, retaking the Panama Canal, building beachfront resorts in Gaza and squeezing $500B of rare earth minerals out of Ukraine isn't imperialism?

Or does Trump get a pass on what he says he'll do, because it's just trolling to trigger the libs?

Obviously the trolling is different from actually doing. And what the substance of what Trump did with Panama was accuse it of failing to respect the neutrality provisions of the treaty which transferred control of the canal to Panama. And in Ukraine he’s demanding security for hundreds of billions in support we have provided that country. Exercising America’s rights under treaties or demanding compensation for military support is hardly comparable to bankrolling dissident groups in foreign countries.

I'd much rather have a President who says dumb things for attention than a President who actually tries (usually in secret) to destabilize other countries.

Because Obama was fully co-opted by the neocon institutions. If you had told them about it during the Bush era liberals would have been outraged.

The creators of South Park literally made a movie mocking the neocon ideology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_America:_World_Police

Yes, the Democratic party was coopted by neocons since Bill Clinton. That's the point of my comment, it has nothing to do with Trump.

Really? 10 years I would have assume the average liberal would have said "Yeah, what else is new? The US has been interfering with other countries since forever. It's a terrible stain on our history and something we should stop.

For some odd reason the average liberal is now arguing for foreign interference by the US. The are using the same neocon talking points the Republicans did 10 years ago - "soft power" and "if we don't do it someone else will".

It's wild to sit back and think about.

I remember very vividly liberals 10, 15 years ago defending "good" foreign interference for example in Syria, for example.

Physical backup of important documents seems like the opposite of waste.

It's not backup, the forms are processed by hand on paper.

that's why you fix it, not act like you can just destroy it and what it does. It is also why you think practically and tell us, the voter, how much extra it is costing us over your "new and improved" program. Just lying about it and exaggerating the concern is a sad, sad, disingenuous way of governing. I want fixes and unrelenting attempts at efficiency and not "hur-duh-hur I can make a meme out of this on X and not offer a single solution"

That’s a good example of penny-wise, pound-foolish thinking: they’ve been asking for funding to modernize for most of this century but Congress chooses not to allocate the money. A big contributing factor is that when money is allocated, it’s often directed towards contractors who cost twice as much and have a higher failure rate so congresspeople can say they “shrunk” the government.

The government does plenty of things inefficiently, but DOGE is making such a colossal mess with their rushed, uninformed, and frequently illegal actions that they're causing more problems than they solve. Indiscriminately firing people because they were hired or promoted within the last 2 years is incredibly wasteful. It means getting rid of the people who were most successful. It also means getting rid of people who had very specialized skills or who just went through a very expensive training process.

Also consider how much disruption all of this is causing to the federal workforce and the contractors. People are being forced to upend their lives on very short notice to RTO. They were getting daily emails telling them to quit. It's hard to imagine anyone doing good work when they're scared that some indiscriminate process is going to fire them.

> DOGE [i.e. Musk] is making such a colossal mess with their rushed, uninformed, and frequently illegal actions that they're causing more problems than they solve.

People said the same thing when Musk took a wrecking ball to Twitter. Now it's more profitable than ever.

I don't know how this is all going to turn out, maybe he really is wrecking the government, but it's certainly too early to call it.

> Now it's more profitable than ever.

The primary owner of X disagrees with you.

"We're barely breaking even" [1]

1. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-says-x-growth-22130...

This is a stupid comparison. The government is not a business. "Lower costs by making it shittier" has a completely different implication when people are relying on the work for national defense, public safety, health, income, and other life-and-death matters.

These are public goods. They shouldn't be run on the basis of "make them as crappy as we can get away with to save as much money as possible".

Government agencies are not Twitter though and their goal is not maximizing the profit.

Will I need to purchase a blue check mark to vote in the next election?

Twitter has 80% less revenue than it's peak in 2022, less than it had in 2014.

Even if it is more profitable, it's doing a heck of a lot less. The government being 80% less effective would be a very bad outcome here.

Was this replaced by a better, more well funded and resourced system? Or was it made worse ?