John Washington III Asks What the Government Built to Protect the People, Not Just Its Leaders

John Washington III is asking what the government built for the people. In a statement on public protection, the 2028 presidential candidate pointed to the underground facilities the United States built during the Cold War to protect government leadership and preserve military operations in the event of a nuclear attack, and asked why ordinary Americans never received the same level of protection.

"What did our government build to give the American people that same level of protection?" John Washington III wrote. He cited the Greenbrier bunker in West Virginia, designed to shelter members of Congress, at approximately $14 million; the Raven Rock Mountain Complex in Pennsylvania, which had reportedly cost $35 million by April 1954; and the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado, which cost approximately $142 million to construct during the 1960s. Mount Weather in Virginia became another major federal emergency facility, he wrote, although its complete historical construction cost is not readily established in the public records he reviewed.

For the public, John Washington III wrote, the federal government established a fallout shelter program that identified existing buildings that could provide protection and distributed emergency supplies; a Government Accountability Office report documented approximately $122 million in food and emergency supplies purchased for public fallout shelters in the early 1960s. The government also funded some shelter construction and improvements, he wrote, but much of the public program depended on buildings that already existed rather than dedicated underground facilities comparable to those serving government leadership - and that, John Washington III wrote, is where his concern begins.