During a February press conference inside the Oval Office, Elon Musk — clad in a black MAGA baseball cap — took aim at an obscure facility outside of Boyers, Pennsylvania.
Musk, who is leading the Trump administration’s controversial effort to slash the size of the federal government, was incredulous that the U.S. processes and stores federal employee retiree paperwork deep below ground in a former limestone mine about an hour north of Pittsburgh.
“This mine looks like something out of the ‘50s, because it was started in 1955,” Musk said, while President Trump looked on from his desk. “So it looks like a time warp.”
What Musk didn’t say is that the former mine, once owned by U.S. Steel, has since been refashioned into a cutting edge digital and records storage facility owned by Portsmouth-based Iron Mountain. The company is one of the world’s leading providers of data and records storage, as well as document scanning and shredding, serving both private companies as well as federal and state governments.
Suddenly, one of its premier storage facilities — 220-feet below ground — was the target of the world’s richest man. Musk claimed — inaccurately — that Iron Mountain’s facility was hampered by basic mechanical troubles.
“The elevator breaks down sometimes, and then nobody can retire,” Musk said.
But less than three months later, it appears that any frustrations Musk had with Iron Mountain and its facilities have been forgiven, or at least forgotten.
Last week, Bill Meany, the company’s CEO, announced that Iron Mountain was set to receive a $142 million contract with the U.S. Treasury Department as part of DOGE’s effort to overhaul the IRS’s system for cutting tax refund checks.
“I would like to thank the Treasury and the Department of Government Efficiency for their trust in Iron Mountain,” Meany said during a quarterly earnings call. He expressed optimism about his company’s opportunities to work with DOGE moving forward.
The whipsaw is a local example of how the Trump administration is approaching its cost-cutting efforts: A New Hampshire company went from the poster child for waste and inefficiency, to being entrusted with processing sensitive tax return payments — seemingly overnight.
Security and protection
Iron Mountain is by some estimates the largest publicly traded company based in New Hampshire — it’s valued at roughly $28 billion — and yet it rarely makes local headlines.
Of its more than 26,000 employees globally, including at data storage facilities on three continents, the firm only has 45 employees based in New Hampshire.
Its commitment to privacy appears to extend to its headquarters on the Pease Tradeport in Portsmouth, where no signs announce its presence outside its nondescript office building.
The company also declined to answer questions for this story.
Musk didn’t mention Iron Mountain by name during his February press conference, when he made claims about the federal government’s systems for processing retiree paperwork, many of which have been disputed by former employees.
But his focus on this limestone mine in Pennsylvania did send Iron Mountain’s stock price tumbling, falling 10% over the following two days.
According to the company’s website, the mine was formerly used by U.S. Steel until the 1950s. Today, it’s a 200-acre underground storage facility with six miles of paved underground roads. It’s also one of Iron Mountain’s premier locations for storing paper and digital archives, “offering unbeatable levels of security and protection.” The federal government, along with health care and financial services companies, all store records in the mine, as do entertainment companies.
Along with protection from natural disasters, the underground location is cool, minimizing expenses for keeping equipment such as computer servers at safe temperatures. More than 600 people work in the facility, according to local media reports, making it a key driver of the local economy.
Major contract
Following Musk’s remarks, Iron Mountain’s Bill Meany, a former CIA agent, worked to paint a more positive picture of the company.
He told market analysts that the company was working with more than 200 different federal agencies, and that he saw “growth opportunities” by partnering with DOGE to streamline those operations.
That partnership came to fruition on April 30, when Iron Mountain inked a $142 million deal with the U.S. Treasury to scan and digitize records for the IRS.
The company declined to answer questions, but a Treasury Department spokesperson said that “reducing paper checks has been a long-standing bipartisan goal that our administration is finally putting into action.”
It isn’t clear if the company’s operations within the Pennsylvania mine, or its work with the government on processing and storing retiree paperwork, has changed following Musk’s critique. In the days following that press conference, Karoline Leavitt, a New Hampshire native currently serving as the president’s press secretary, promised swift action, declaring that Trump would shut down the facility.
Investors seem to discount the possibility of that, however: the company’s stock price has regained all of the value it lost in mid-February.
