I'm Alex Narasta, the Vice President for Economic and Social Policy Studies at the Cato Institute,

and I'm being joined by Travis Fisher, the Director of Energy and Environmental Policy Studies at Cato.

Travis, how are you doing today?

Great to be with you, Alex. I'm doing well. How are you doing?

Doing great. So for the last four months or so, you have been

working on a detail with the Department of Energy. And a detail is like a loan where you work for

Cato, but you're helping out over the Department of Energy, helping them get their house in order,

sort of say, to be a little bit more libertarian.

And you just returned back from working there, and now you're back in the Cato building.

For the time you were working there at the Department of Energy, you couldn't talk about what you were doing.

It was pretty mysterious, but now you can't.

So what were you doing over there?

It was top secret, and now it's only medium secret, so I can talk about a fair amount of what I did. And to clarify on the

detail, I didn't know that this was an option, but it's apparently pretty frequently used,

the Intergovernment Personnel Act, if you're a nonprofit, typically universities, but also think tanks.

So if you're a 501c3, you can detail people into the government.

And in Cato's case, obviously Cato didn't want to be reimbursed, compensated by a government.

We have rules against that.

So I was on loan from Cato to the DOE and didn't cost taxpayers anything.

Well, we like that.

And this is, I think, the first time if I'm aware of, maybe Cato did this a long time ago,

but the first time I'm aware of where we had this kind of arrangement where you would go and work in a federal agency as a

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