Know Your Government Plans
Five myths about continuity of government:
Myth No. 1: The president is the most important part of government.
Great effort does go into protecting the president, but continuity plans are about ensuring that someone in the line of succession survives — so they can take over. The plans often assume that the president dies in the opening minutes of a national catastrophe. But while the president may die, the presidency always lives.
Myth No. 2: Only government leaders would survive a catastrophe.
As Tech Insider summed it up in a 2017 video, secret bunkers around the country “would hold top officials, their support staff, and no one else.” Other plans called for a “Doomsday press corps,” reporters who would be flown to the bunkers to help communicate with the public, and some companies like Shell Oil and Standard Oil even built their own bunkers for their executives.
Myth No. 3: The government's doomsday facilities are secret.
In 1992, The Washington Post shocked the nation (and most members of Congress) with its revelation that there was a huge bunker for the legislative branch under the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia. But the facilities in use today exist in a strange netherworld where they are highly classified but also mostly mundane government offices, albeit underground. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is responsible for the civilian government’s doomsday planning, even has on its website a fact sheet about its 564-acre Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, although the document’s a bit obtuse about the massive bunker underneath the aboveground facilities.
Myth No. 4: The bunkers are central to the doomsday plans.
But the underground hideaways designed by countries around the world, from the United States to Canada to Britain to Israel, are just one segment of the continuity plans — and they’re not even necessarily expected to be the most useful in a catastrophe, particularly when a country faces a threat like, say, a pandemic, when being underground is no safer than being isolated anywhere else.
Myth No. 5: Secret plans call for martial law and concentration camps.
The idea that the government has a plan to round up dissidents and imprison them in places like a secret Wyoming facility and an Amtrak repair yard in Indiana after declaring martial law is one of the longest-running and most pervasive conspiracy theories around. Those programs and facilities, though, were largely wound down and mothballed in the 1960s — or at least that’s what the government says.
https://whitehouse.gov1.info/continuity-plan