The DOE won’t explain why Bill Gates had a Top Secret “Q” clearance for seven years.

The detail comes from a DOE letter entered into the Congressional record by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY). The letter emerged as Fauci faced fierce Republican blowback during his Senate hearing last week, where the longtime face of COVID policy pleaded the Fifth more than 100 times.

A “Q” clearance is the Energy Department’s highest classification level, the kind normally reserved for people working on nuclear weapons design, national labs, critical energy infrastructure, and highly classified scientific research. Gates kept that clearance for seven years, starting under President Obama and running through the entirety of the COVID-19 pandemic.

One explanation as to why; Gates founded and chairs TerraPower, the advanced nuclear reactor company that has spent years working alongside DOE national laboratories and won Nuclear Regulatory Commission construction approval in March. A nuclear executive holding a nuclear clearance is not, on its own, a scandal.

But the letter doesn’t mention TerraPower – or why he had it at all. What it does say is that the clearance was granted reciprocally on June 11, 2014 – meaning it originated at another federal agency, and DOE simply honored it – before terminating on December 6, 2021. The letter does not name the agency that vetted him in the first place.

That’s the question sitting in the middle of this document, and nobody in the federal government has answered it. Which agency decided a private citizen needed access to Restricted Data under the Atomic Energy Act, and for what program?

Once a Q clearance expires, getting it back isn’t automatic. The government keeps reviewing eligibility, and anyone hoping to restore it usually has to show a real change in circumstances.