According to a startling assertion made by a former housing official who served under President George H. W. Bush, the US government invested years of funds to build a covert underground “city” where the wealthy and influential might seek refuge in the event of a “near-extinction event.”

Although there is no hard proof to back up her assertions, Catherine Austin Fitts, the assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 1989 to 1990, made the startling accusations during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, a podcast hosted by former Fox News presenter.

Fitts, 74, who is originally from Philadelphia, cited research by Michigan State University economist Mark Skidmore, who released a report in 2017 stating he and a team of scholars had uncovered $21 trillion in “unauthorised spending in the departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015”.

According to Skidmore at the time, Fitts “referred to a report which indicated the Army had $6.5 trillion in unsupported adjustments, or spending, in fiscal 2015,” which prompted him to start looking into the unreported spending.

“Given the Army’s $122 billion budget, that meant unsupported adjustments were 54 times spending authorised by Congress. Typically, such adjustments in public budgets are only a small fraction of authorised spending,” the report noted.

At first, Skidmore claimed he believed Fitts had erred, supposing she had intended to say $6.5 billion rather than trillion.

“So I found the report myself and sure enough it was $6.5 trillion,” he said.

Before joining Bush’s administration, Fitts was an investment banker. She said that money was used to finance the creation of an “underground base, city infrastructure and transport system” that has been kept secret from the public.

“One of the things I’ve looked at in the process of looking at where all this money is going is the underground base, city infrastructure, and transportation system that’s been built,” she said.

“We have built an extraordinary number of underground bases and, supposedly, transportation systems.”

There are 170 secret facilities in the United States alone, she told Carlson, adding that she and a team of investigators sifted through “all the data and all the allegations on underground bases” to make a “guess” as to how many might exist. She claimed to have spent two years investigating where the $21 trillion had gone.

Fitts also claimed that a number of these sites are not only underground but even under oceans.

“We systematically went through and tried to estimate our guess — this is totally a guess — of how many underground bases [there are], both underground in the United States, but also underground under the ocean around the United States. And our estimate was 170 with a transportation network connecting them,” she said.

In response to Carlson’s question about the “purpose” of these underground bunkers, Fitts stated that they would be used in the event that a “near extinction event” was thought to be imminent.

She did, however, add that she thinks the government might also utilise these so-called sites to conduct “secret” initiatives, including a “secret space program.”

Carlson responded by claiming that he actually knew “a contractor who worked on one in Washington, DC,” stating: “I remember him telling me about a power box, like a transformer box, on Constitution Ave. … He told me [that] was actually the exit, the egress from the White House.”

“And I thought, that’s kind of crazy in the middle of this big city where I live … you could build something like that without me knowing it.”

Carlson said he had always assumed that those kinds of bases were only located in D.C.—and that they were meant specifically for some kind of “nuclear war”, to which Fitts responded, “Some of it is. It’s preparation for catastrophe.”

Fitts stated that she thinks the government has discovered a method to produce innovative energy, which she thinks is being utilised to power these purported cities and infrastructure.

“I’m convinced that this energy exists. If you look at a lot of the really fast ships, flying around the planet, they’re not using classical electricity,” she claimed.

Fitts’ contentious statements were made just months after SAFE (Strategically Armoured & Fortified Environments), a Virginia-based corporation, revealed plans for a $300 million, members-only, doomsday bunker named “Aerie.”

The company says the facility will offer “AI-powered” medical care, “wellness programs” and the ability to “blend protection and luxury” in a way that has never been done before.

Due to Virginia’s close proximity to Washington, D.C., SAFE said it intended to build the bunkers in all 50 states, with each entrant paying a $20 million membership fee.

“It’s the wealthiest state per capita,” a company spokesperson previously told Realtor.com. “It’s ground zero for the finest demographic for something like this in the world.”