Faced with a surplus of dairy products in the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. government opened a number of government "cheese caves," especially in Missouri, to hold its ballooning supply.
Springfield UndergroundThe Springfield Underground, one of many “cheese caves” in Missouri, today.
Stories have long spread that somewhere far beneath the United States, the U.S. government is hiding mountains of cheese. While some internet retellings of the story may get some details wrong, there’s more than a kernel of truth in the story of U.S. government cheese caves.
Indeed, there are cheese caves far beneath the ground — largely in states like Missouri — and they do hold over a billion pounds of cheese. However, these “cheese caves” are really more like warehouses, converted from old limestone mines. Most of them are now rented out to private companies.
It may sound strange at first, but the reasoning behind government cheese caves is actually pretty sound. These caves are located so far below the surface that the facilities are naturally cool, meaning private companies — and at one point, the American government — could save a lot of money and energy to preserve their products.
So why did the government decided to repurpose these old mines in the first place? It all started in the 1970s — when economic policies out of Washington inadvertently created a surplus of cheese.
This is the true story behind the U.S. government cheese caves.
How The United States Government Ended Up With Millions Of Pounds Of Cheese
The story of the U.S. government cheese caves really began back during World War II. At the time, wartime rations and food shortages create fears about future food supply issues, especially when it came to dairy.
So, after the war, the government took steps to prevent any future dairy supply scarcity. The Agricultural Act of 1949 guaranteed a minimum price for milk and, if market prices fell, the government would buy surplus dairy products in order to stabilize prices.
But this policy went into overdrive during the 1970s, under President Jimmy Carter.
RBM Vintage Images/Alamy Stock PhotoPresident Jimmy Carter on his peanut farm. His background as a farmer inspired some of his policy decisions, such as subsidizing dairy farms in the 1970s.
During the 1970s, dairy farmers struggled with inflation and rising costs. Carter, a peanut farmer by trade, was sympathetic to their plight and oversaw an infusion of $2 billion dollars to the ailing industry.
Dairy farmers then started producing more — and the government continued to buy up any dairy surpluses. To extend the shelf life of the dairy supplies it purchased, the government also began to use the excess milk to make products like cheese, butter, and dehydrated milk powder. Before long, the U.S. government had 500 million pounds of dairy on its hand.
But now they had another problem. Where was the government supposed to store all this excess dairy?
The answer, it turned out, was in government cheese caves in Missouri.
The Birth Of Missouri Cheese Caves
Beneath Missouri is an extensive series of limestone deposits which have been mined thoroughly over time. The mining industry left behind broad, dry caverns where, because of their subterranean nature, the air is naturally cool. And in the 1980s, the U.S. government realized that these caverns would be the perfect place to store dairy products like cheese.
Springfield UndergroundFood storage at the Springfield Underground.
“Once the mining operations played out, the remaining system of caverns were recognized as an opportunity for climate-controlled storage with massive holding capacity and access,” Andrew M. Novaković, professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University, explained to Food & Wine.
Though government cheese caves also popped up in Wisconsin and Kansas, two sites in Missouri became particularly well-known: the Springfield Underground in Springfield and SubTropolis in Kansas City, which each held millions of pounds of dairy products. Springfield Underground alone offers around 3.2 million square feet of subterranean space.
“The caves are actually man-made mines from which millions of tons of limestone were extracted for gravel,” The New York Times reported in 1982. “One corridor, which twists among the supporting pillars for more than 200 yards, is now filled to its 17-foot ceiling with sacks of dried milk. In another, the four-foot high cheese barrels are stacked four barrels high into the ceiling’s gloom. And in one vast anteroom, kept at zero degrees Fahrenheit, are frozen boxes of butter, piled to the chamber’s frigid top.”
Wikimedia CommonsThe five-pound blocks of “government cheese” that were stored in the underground facilities.
The cheese caves gave the government a place to store excess dairy products, but as the surplus grew into the millions — and even billions — of pounds, American policymakers also started looking for ways to get rid of it.
Inside The Creation Of ‘Government Cheese’
“We’ve got 60 million of these that the government owns,” Agriculture Secretary John R. Block told reporters at a 1981 press conference, a moldy brick of cheese in his hand. “It’s moldy, it’s deteriorating… we can’t find a market for it, we can’t sell it, and we’re looking to try to give some of it away.”
That was the plan the Reagan administration had landed on. There were other proposals — one USDA official quipped to the Washington Post that they should just dump the excess cheese in the ocean — but distributing the cheese to poor Americans seemed like the best solution. At a time when many American families were struggling to get by, the government sitting on a mountain of cheese — or even dumping it into the sea — was a bad look.
Wikimedia CommonsPresident Ronald Reagan in 1985, holding a large block of cheese.
So, administration created the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) to ship five-pound blocks of processed cheddar to states, food banks, and community centers.
“At a time when American families are under increasing financial pressure, their government cannot sit by and watch millions of pounds of food turn to waste,” Ronald Reagan, who had spent much of his presidential campaign critiquing “welfare queens” for defrauding the government, announced on Dec. 22, 1981. “I am authorizing today the immediate release of 30 million pounds [of cheese]… The cheese will be delivered to the States that request it and will be distributed free to the needy by nonprofit organizations.”
Thus, “government cheese,” long stored in “government cheese caves,” was created.
The Legacy And Impact Of “Government Cheese”
Government cheese was a mixed blessing for the families who received it. On the one hand, more than 300 million pounds of surplus cheese was distributed in the early 1980s, which fed people during a recession. Government cheese also helped stabilize a stressed farm sector. At the same time, it’s not as if the government was handing out a finely aged cheddar.
“When it became imperative to ‘use it or lose it’ with these cheeses, the government decided, quite logically, that the best way to use it was to make what most of us call American cheese, or processed cheese,” Novaković explained.
This ultra-processed government cheese was calorie dense and high in saturated fat and sodium compared with many fresh foods. Even today, experts are concerned about the long-term impact of saturated fat from cheese in U.S. diets. Of course, government cheese also carried a heavy stigma.
Many saw the five-pound orange cheese bricks as a symbol of poverty — and the fact that it was fairly unhealthy may have contributed in furthering to stereotypes about low-income Americans.
Wikimedia CommonsUSDA commodity cheese was not a healthy choice — but some people remember it fondly.
“The dense, salty cheese was emblematic of the era’s social safety net: essential, flawed, and stigmatized,” journalist Colleen Hamilton wrote in Offrange in 2025. “These contradictions were used to justify sweeping changes. Under Reagan, the federal government began scaling back and privatizing key food assistance programs, leading to a major reduction in SNAP. The public image of food aid shifted from a social right to a begrudging handout.”
Government cheese was a perfect example of how well-intentioned governance — bolstering dairy producers in Carter’s case, and feeding hungry Americans in Reagan’s — can often create unforeseen problems.
Today, many of the government cheese caves created during this period still exist, though they are largely free from governmental influence. Instead, they’re leased and operated by private companies to store products, including, of course, cheese.
After learning about why the U.S. government constructed cheese caves beneath Missouri, read about how the Whiskey Rebellion shook the newly-formed United States to its core. Then, read about 11 secret government operations that are almost too crazy to believe.
