The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has claimed that the US government has saved a million dollars per year “by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70-year-old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records.”

In a message on Elon Musk's social media platform X, the Musk body said the General Services Administration (GSA) IT team "just saved" the money through the migration, but gave no other details.

While tape storage was invented 70 years ago, the magnetic tapes used by the government are based on newer technology - transistors are similarly 70+ years old, but semiconductors are much more advanced now.

Linear Tape-Open (LTO) has advanced significantly, vastly improving its storage capabilities and read speed. For archival storage, where access is infrequent and low-speed, tape remains the cheapest and greenest approach.

At rest, tape requires no power, and can last 15-30 years, depending on storage conditions. Microsoft is in the midst of an ambitious effort to build a new cold storage technology out of silica glass, but the project is still years away from fruition - and, in the meantime, the company offers tape storage.

It is not clear what DOGE means by "permanent modern digital records." No storage system is permanent, requiring copying forward at the end of the medium's useable life.

With hard drives and SSDs lasting just a few years if actively run (and a few more if not), that means regularly shifting the data to a new generation of hardware and destroying the old equipment.

Also unclear is when the data migration occurred - digitizing and converting 14,000 tapes would be a large task. DOGE has claimed credit for modernization efforts that predated it, so it is possible this was already in the works.

Where it is stored is unknown, but the data was likely moved to a cloud provider - who might ultimately use tape for the storage.

It is also possible that the GSA shifted the data to hotter storage to be able to access it faster and more regularly, although this would cost more.

However, without more details, the DOGE claim remains hard to verify and at odds with the realities of storage costs.

This is not the first time Musk and DOGE have taken aim at physical storage.

In February 2025, Musk criticized a federal contract with Iron Mountain to store physical records, labeling it a "time warp" and adding: "The speed at which the mineshaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal government. And the elevator breaks down sometimes, and then nobody can retire. Doesn't that sound crazy?"

The latter claim appears to be unfounded. While a 2019 Government Accountability Office report criticized the process, it said that manual work, understaffing, and incomplete applications were to blame for the delays, not elevator issues.

The department did not respond to requests for clarification regarding the savings it claims to have made by digitizing the magnetic tapes.