Catherine Fitts’ Secret Underground Base Claims are Unlikely Given Ordinary U.S. Government Incompetence
In a recent appearance on Tucker Carlson's show, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Catherine Austin Fitts claimed that roughly $21 trillion in "unauthorised" or unsupported adjustments at the Departments of Defense and HUD between 1998 and 2015 funded a network of about 170 secret underground (and undersea) bases and "city" infrastructure. These facilities, she argued, are linked by hidden transportation systems, powered by undisclosed energy technology, and intended as elite refuges for a "near-extinction event," possibly alongside a secret space program. She described the number as a "guess" derived from reviewing known bases and allegations, cross-checked against the accounting figures.
The claim has no corroborating evidence beyond that accounting anomaly and Fitts' inference. Known U.S. government underground facilities exist: Cheyenne Mountain, Raven Rock, Mount Weather, and the old Greenbrier bunker are public knowledge, but nothing approaching a 170-site connected underground city system has been documented.
The more decisive objection is institutional competence. The same federal apparatus that Fitts portrays as capable of quietly moving trillions and constructing an enormous secret subterranean network over decades routinely fails at far smaller, fully public tasks.
The Department of Defense has failed every full financial audit since they became mandatory. Year after year the Pentagon cannot account for large portions of its budget; "unsupported adjustments" of the kind Skidmore highlighted are a known feature of its broken bookkeeping, not proof of a hidden construction program of unprecedented scale. Large unsupported adjustments appear in complex government accounting systems because of poor records, mismatched systems, and weak internal controls, not because a parallel underground civilisation is being built off the books.
Look at the recent public record. The Afghanistan withdrawal was a visible logistical and political failure conducted in plain sight. Major infrastructure projects routinely run years late and billions over budget. Border enforcement, basic procurement, and even routine IT modernisation are chronic sources of waste and embarrassment. A government that struggles to keep track of its own inventory, that leaks constantly, and that cannot complete straightforward public projects without cost overruns and congressional hearings, is an improbable candidate for a multi-decade, multi-trillion-dollar secret construction program involving 170 sites, undersea facilities, and proprietary energy systems.
Such a project would require thousands of workers, contractors, engineers, and suppliers, plus continuous logistics, power, ventilation, and security. Satellite imagery, FOIA requests, former employees, and ordinary human leakage make total secrecy of that magnitude implausible. Real classified programs exist and are imperfectly protected; a network large enough to absorb $21 trillion would leave far more physical and documentary traces than have ever surfaced.
The accounting figures are real and worth investigating as a symptom of chronic financial mismanagement, or fraud. Interpreting them as funding for an elite doomsday underground city is an inference that requires assuming a level of sustained competence, coordination, and secrecy that the U.S. government has repeatedly demonstrated it does not possess. The simpler explanation, bad bookkeeping plus ordinary waste and known classified facilities, fits the observable record far better.
In short, the United States government is not good enough at basic administration to have built the secret infrastructure Fitts describes. That is not a defence of government; it is an observation of its actual track record.
