Even as the influence of DOGE wanes across Washington, at least one initiative from the once-feared project is thriving.
The effort to digitize the federal government’s paper-based retirement system, led by DOGE member and Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, is progressing steadily ahead of what is expected to be an unusually busy season.
Unlike many of DOGE’s controversial initiatives, this one is widely supported across President Donald Trump’s administration. That’s thanks to both an impending flood of retirement applications and the absurdity of the current system, which relies in large part on Iron Mountain, a decommissioned limestone mine in western Pennsylvania, to store records.
“Gebbia carries a lot of clout,” said one official close to DOGE, granted anonymity to speak candidly.
The need for modernization is unquestioned. Roughly 100,000 federal workers retire every year, and their forms are largely stored on paper in the vast mine located roughly an hour outside Pittsburgh.
And this is unlikely to be a typical year. The Office of Personnel Management is bracing for a surge in retirements at the end of the year from the crush of federal employees who have opted into the administration’s Voluntary Early Retirement and deferred resignation programs.
OPM on July 15 stopped accepting paper applications and launched the third iteration of its Online Retirement Application system, which is replacing the Government Benefits Platform.
The push is led by a small coalition of DOGE members and civil servants based at OPM. Alongside Gebbia, the group includes DOGE veterans Akash Bobba and Jamie Sullivan, OPM Director Scott Kupor, and a pair of former Airbnb engineers — Yat Choi and Andrew Vilcsak — who joined over the summer, according to agency records viewed by West Wing Playbook. They’ve worked hand-in-hand with longtime OPM career staff like Kimya Lee and human resources officials from the IRS.
“We started with low-hanging fruit including the automation of the retirement application process, the calculation of basic retirement annuities, and with the capability to support digital signatures on a subset of retirement-related documents,” former OPM Chief Technology Officer Al Himler, who left government earlier this year, wrote in a blog post last month.
“The team at OPM have been working tirelessly to take the federal retirement system digital,” Kupor said in a statement. “Success will be for nearly all federal employees to self retire in a matter of seconds as opposed to the antiquated process that can take several months if not years to complete.”
Gebbia’s presence, in particular, has helped inoculate the project from the political drama that stymied other DOGE efforts. Unlike Steve Davis, the former DOGE lead who tried to stay past his welcome and had a falling out with senior White House officials as a result, Gebbia has maintained a low profile inside government.
“Joe’s got a name that’s well recognized, and the work that he’s doing is not political,” said a person familiar with DOGE, also granted anonymity to speak freely.
That wasn’t always obvious. When Gebbia joined DOGE in February while the group was slashing and burning its way through federal agencies, Airbnb moved quickly to distance itself from its co-founder.
“Joe is joining DOGE in his personal capacity,” Christopher Nulty, Airbnb’s head of corporate communications, told Skift,a travel news site. “His personal views don’t reflect the views of Airbnb or Airbnb.org.”
Though Gebbia was a longtime Democratic donor, he says he “voted Republican” in 2024. He embraced the Make America Healthy Again movement, including Trump’s revival of the Presidential Fitness Test and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plans to overhaul the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.
He’s also shown flashes of the pugnacious tone that has become a DOGE trademark. “At this point anyone still taking time out of their life to protest @DOGE and name call using the third reich has outed themselves as having an actual disorder,” Gebbia posted on X last week.
Elsewhere in the Trump administration, the DOGE effort to negotiate better rates for the federal government by forming direct relationships with IT manufacturers is also moving forward.
That project, dubbed “OneGov,” is being led by DOGE members Josh Gruenbaum, head of the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service, and Stephen Ehikian, deputy acting administrator of GSA.
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