A former housing official who worked under President George H. W. Bush has made an astonishing claim that the U.S. government spent years funneling money into the creation of a secret underground city" where the rich and powerful can shelter in the event of a "near-extinction event." Catherine Austin Fitts ... served as the assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Housing between 1989 and 1990. Fitts ... cited research by Michigan State University economist Mark Skidmore, who released a report in 2017 stating that he and a team of scholars had uncovered $21 trillion in "unauthorized spending in the departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015." According to Fitts, who worked as an investment banker before joining Bush's administration, that money was used to fund the development of what she described as an "underground base, city infrastructure and transportation system" that has been kept hidden from the public. She [said] that she spent two years researching where the $21 trillion had gone, alleging that she uncovered evidence that there are 170 secret facilities in the U.S. alone, explaining that she and a team of investigators combed through "all the data and all the allegations on underground bases" in order to make a "guess" as to how many might exist. Additionally, Fitts alleged that several of these bases are located beneath oceans"not just underground.