A former US government official has made a shocking claim that the US secretly spent $21 trillion of public money to build a huge underground “city” meant for the ultra-rich and top officials to survive a future disaster.

Catherine Austin Fitts, who was assistant secretary at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development during President George HW Bush’s term, made this claim during an interview on former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson’s podcast.

Fitts did not show any solid proof, but she referred to a 2017 study by Mark Skidmore, an economist from Michigan State University. The study had pointed out large amounts of “unauthorised spending” from 1998 to 2015 in two US departments – the Defence Department and the Housing and Urban Development Department.

Fitts said she spent several years looking into where this $21 trillion could have gone. “We systematically went through and tried to estimate... how many underground bases, both underground in the United States and also underground under the ocean around the United States,” Fitts said. “And our estimate was 170 with a transportation network connecting them.”

She claimed that many of these bases are built under the ocean and are connected through a transport system. Fitts also suggested that this network could be linked to a “secret space program” or other hidden government operations.

The US government does have some known bunkers, such as Mount Weather in Virginia, Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, and Raven Rock in Pennsylvania. These are used in emergency situations. But Fitts claimed that there is a much bigger and secret network of underground bases.

When Carlson asked if these were just for Washington DC in case of a nuclear war, Fitts replied, “Some of it is. It’s preparation for catastrophe.”

She did not give more details about who has access to these bunkers or how big the network is. Meanwhile, media reports say that a known underground facility at Mount Weather is being updated, but the reason remains “classified”.

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