Donald Trump signed an executive order to study the creation of a sovereign wealth fund for the United States. It’s a bad idea that shouldn’t go anywhere.

One sign that it’s a bad idea is that the Biden administration was similarly studying creating one. It’s obvious why: It would give Democrats another way to push public money into green energy and other politically favored industries without needing to go through Congress as direct government spending. The potential for cronyism with a sovereign wealth fund is dizzying, and the record of current government efforts to direct investment should not give anyone confidence that it would be competently or fairly managed. (“But we’ll use it for our cronyism” — no, all cronyism is bad, and the other side will be in power roughly half the time anyway.)

There are economic arguments for sovereign wealth funds, but they are premised on a country’s running a budget surplus. Think of petrostates with relatively small populations. Their governments pull in massive amounts of revenue from oil sales and don’t have a ton to spend it on, so they can invest it at higher rates of return and use it to fund the government. The U.S. is running enormous budget deficits, forecast to get even bigger as things currently stand, and it would have to borrow even more money to start a sovereign wealth fund.

Among “nice” countries, Norway is the canonical example of a successful sovereign wealth fund. (Most of the other examples — Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., China — are not so nice.) Even putting aside the fact that the Norwegian fund frequently uses its investments to push ESG-style goals (while still investing in China, naturally), Norway has a savings rate of 8 percent and a fairly stable debt-to-GDP ratio of 44 percent and has averaged a budget surplus of 10 percent of GDP since the 1990s. The U.S. has a savings rate half that high, a growing debt-to-GDP ratio of 122 percent, and managed to turn a very healthy government budget from the 1990s into an ongoing tsunami of red ink, today running a fiscal deficit that, as a share of GDP, is higher than at any point during the Great Depression.

The United States has a ton of wealth. The federal government is a poor steward of the chunk of it that it already controls. It should control less, not more. U.S. wealth is best off in private hands.