President Donald Trump on Feb. 3 signed an executive order directing the Treasury and Commerce secretaries to establish a U.S. sovereign wealth fund.
“I think it's about time that this country has a sovereign wealth fund,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick, the nominee for Commerce secretary, will spearhead the effort, Trump added.
Text for the executive order was not immediately available nor were details on how it would be funded, but Bessent, who joined Trump at the Oval Office, said the fund would be created in the next 12 months, calling it an issue “of great strategic importance.”
"We're going to monetize the asset side of the U.S. balance sheet for the American people," Bessent added. "We're going to put the assets to work, and I think it's going to be very exciting. We're going to study best practices done around the world. It will be a combination of liquid assets, assets that we have in this country as we work to bring them out for the American people."
Trump on the campaign trail floated a U.S. sovereign wealth fund supported through tariffs to pay for infrastructure projects and reduce the national debt.
“We’ll create America’s own sovereign wealth fund to invest in great national endeavors for the benefit of all of the American people,” Trump said during a Sept. 5 speech before the Economic Club of New York. “Why don’t we have a wealth fund? Other countries have a wealth funds. We have nothing. We have nothing. We’re going to have a sovereign wealth fund, or we can name it something different.”
Despite Trump's executive order, Congress would have to approve such a fund.
Several states already have sovereign wealth funds — government-controlled investment funds that enable excess capital to be invested — including ones backed by energy and mineral resources, like the $80.5 billion Alaska Permanent Fund Corp., Juneau, the largest in the U.S.
Countries with significant commodity exports such as Norway, China, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait also have massive sovereign wealth funds, with trillions of dollars in assets among the group.