A NEW AMERICAN WEALTH ARCHITECTURE DLG PARTNERS STRATEGIC BRIEFING TO CLIENTS AND PARTNERS

Donald Trump’s initiative to create a United States sovereign wealth fund is one of the most consequential experiments in American economic strategy in decades. For the first time, the federal government is moving to formalize what other nations have honed into an art form: a national investment engine designed to convert state assets, fiscal flows, and strategic advantages into enduring wealth, resilience, and influence.

This is not yet a finished institution. It is an architecture under active construction. The legal shell is still being defined, but the behavior is already visible. The United States is beginning to act the way Norway did when it first harnessed its oil revenues, as Singapore did when it professionalized its state holdings, and as the Gulf states did when they turned hydrocarbons into global capital. The rules are not settled, the structures are still fluid, and the relationships that will define access are being formed now. That is precisely why this moment is so important.

DLG Partners issues this briefing to explain what is being built, how it is already operating in practice, where its money comes from, which companies and sectors are receiving that capital, and how sophisticated partners can position themselves as limited partners, co-investors, or even designated co-managers within this emerging system. The goal is not simply to describe the landscape but to help clients move through it with clarity, creativity, and control.

In February 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled A Plan for Establishing a United States Sovereign Wealth Fund. The order did not instantly create a monolithic fund with its own board, statute, and consolidated balance sheet. Instead, it instructed the Secretaries of the Treasury and Commerce, in coordination with the Office of Management and Budget and senior economic officials, to deliver a comprehensive plan for such a fund within a defined timeframe.

That plan was tasked with answering several foundational questions. How should the fund be capitalized? What mandate should it have? How independent should it be from day-to-day politics? How should its governance be structured? How should it sit alongside existing federal programs and agencies that already deploy capital? The text of the order makes clear that the ambition is to create a vehicle capable of stewarding national wealth across generations, while reinforcing U.S. economic and strategic leadership.

In other words, the United States is at its founding moment. Norway once had to decide what to do with oil surpluses. Singapore had to work out how to manage a web of state-owned assets. Today, Washington is confronting its own version of that question: how to harness a vast but scattered asset base, a deep financial system, and a complex political order to serve long-term national interests instead of short-term fiscal needs.

Legally, the executive order launched a process rather than an institution. A true sovereign wealth fund, with permanent capital and a long-term mandate, will almost certainly require Congress to enact a charter that defines its legal personality, its powers, and its relationship to the federal budget. Until that happens, the administration has done the next best thing: it has begun using existing tools to behave like a sovereign investor, while preparing the ground for a formal fund.

On paper, there is not yet a single entity called the United States Sovereign Wealth Fund with a published portfolio and a public board. In practice, however, the United States is already deploying capital in a way that looks very much like sovereign wealth investing. It is using established statutes and agencies to build a portfolio of strategic stakes in critical sectors, and it is doing so at scale.

The core pillars of this de facto architecture are threefold.

First, the Defense Production Act. Title III of the Defense Production Act allows the president to allocate funds to support domestic production capabilities deemed essential to national security. Traditionally, this has meant grants, loans, guarantees, and contracts. Under the current approach, it has been interpreted more aggressively as an authority that can support direct equity and quasi-equity participation in companies. Instead of merely subsidizing, the government is taking actual stakes.

Second, specialized appropriations under new legislation, most notably the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and related defense and industrial measures. This legislation provides roughly 150 billion dollars for targeted national security and industrial base investments. Embedded within that total are dedicated pools of capital for the Department of Defense’s Office of Strategic Capital, the Industrial Base Fund, the Defense Innovation Unit, and other bodies. These pools are structured not as generic spending lines, but as investment capital designed to support specific projects and companies and to be leveraged into larger sums.

Third, the balance sheet and authorities of agencies such as the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and the Office of Strategic Capital. The Development Finance Corporation, historically oriented toward overseas projects, has been delegated Defense Production Act authority to issue direct loans and guarantees for domestic critical mineral production. The Office of Strategic Capital has been given a substantial credit subsidy that it can leverage many times over into loans for high-priority technologies.

Taken together, these tools allow the United States to act like a sovereign wealth fund even before a dedicated legal entity is born. The capital is real, the transactions are real, and the companies receiving that capital can be named.

Given that there is no standalone sovereign wealth statute yet, it is important to be precise about where the current money actually comes from.

Part of it comes from Defense Production Act appropriations. Congress funds the DPA’s Title III account, and the administration uses those dollars to make equity investments, loans, and guarantees in firms deemed essential to national security. When the government buys a stake in a chipmaker or critical minerals producer under this authority, it is effectively deploying sovereign capital funded by those appropriations.

Another part comes from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and similar measures. Under that legislation, the Industrial Base Fund has received 8.2 billion dollars, with 5 billion dollars explicitly earmarked for critical mineral supply chain investments. The National Defense Stockpile Transaction Fund has received an additional 2 billion dollars to build and manage stockpiles of strategic materials. The Office of Strategic Capital has received 500 million dollars in credit subsidy, which can be levered into up to 100 billion dollars in loans under federal credit rules. The Defense Innovation Unit has been allocated 2 billion dollars for scaled technology projects and nearly 100 million dollars for its own operations. All of this is appropriated money, structured for investment.

A further tranche comes from agency balance sheets under new or expanded authorities. The International Development Finance Corporation, for example, has been given responsibility for a domestic mineral production fund, 25 billion dollars in loan and guarantee capacity focused specifically on mining and processing projects in the United States. That capacity derives from the DFC’s existing capital base and its delegated authority under the Defense Production Act and other statutes.

There are also conceptual or prospective funding sources that policymakers are exploring. Tariff revenues generate tens of billions of dollars annually. There have been public discussions about directing a portion of these revenues into a sovereign fund, effectively turning border taxes into national equity. Similarly, some have proposed revaluing the Treasury’s gold holdings on the federal balance sheet, which are currently carried at a statutory book value far below market prices, and using part of that revaluation as seed capital. These ideas would require further legislative action, but they illustrate the mindset: monetizing underused public assets and cash flows into long-term capital.

This architecture is not notional. It is already visible in concrete investments and commitments.

In the rare earths sector, MP Materials stands as a prime example. As the only significant rare earth producer in the United States, it occupies a central place in the supply chain for magnets used in everything from fighter jets to electric vehicles. Under the Defense Production Act, the Department of Defense has committed 400 million dollars in equity financing to MP Materials. This investment is structured to give the government up to a 15 percent stake in the company and is tied to long-term offtake arrangements under which the government agrees to purchase 100 percent of the magnets produced at a new facility. The investment has not only secured strategic domestic capacity; it has catalyzed an additional 1 billion dollars in private financing from major financial institutions to build MP Materials’ new “10X” plant.

In semiconductors, the federal government has taken a 10 percent stake in Intel, again through DPA funding, to support domestic chip manufacturing. Semiconductor fabrication is capital-intensive, slow to build, and strategically sensitive. By placing public equity directly into one of the most important firms in the sector, the United States is signaling that it is willing to act as an anchor shareholder in its own industrial base.

Lithium Americas, a key player in domestic lithium production, has also seen the government acquire a 5 percent stake. Lithium is essential for batteries and energy storage, which in turn underpin electric vehicles, grid stability, and defense systems. Here too, the government is acting not just as a regulator and procurer but as an owner.

Beyond these headline investments, the funding pools created by the Industrial Base Fund, the National Defense Stockpile Transaction Fund, and the Office of Strategic Capital are being deployed across a range of projects. The Industrial Base Fund’s 5 billion dollar critical mineral earmark supports mining, processing, and refining ventures across the value chain. The Stockpile Transaction Fund finances the purchase and management of strategic material inventories. The Office of Strategic Capital’s Domestic Manufacturing Loan Program has already received requests totaling 8.9 billion dollars, a clear sign of how quickly sovereign-style capital finds willing partners.

At a different scale, the 24.4 billion dollars allocated for the “Golden Dome” missile defense initiative demonstrates the same mindset in another domain. While it is not an equity investment in a single company, it represents a long-term, large-scale capital commitment to build an integrated air and missile defense system with ripple effects across the defense industrial base.

Even apart from these explicit stakes, the pattern of federal activity carries the imprint of sovereign wealth logic.

In critical minerals, equity, offtake, and stockpiling arrangements are being used together to secure supply chains for rare earths, lithium, and other materials. In semiconductors and microelectronics, government capital and guarantees are underpinning facilities that would otherwise be too risky or costly for private actors alone. In artificial intelligence and data infrastructure, proposed long-term commitments to build and operate data centers and compute hubs are being structured as partnerships between the state and major technology firms, with shared capital and defined strategic outcomes.

Internationally, the United States is positioning itself as the anchor destination for vast pools of allied capital. Japan has pledged substantial resources to support U.S. semiconductor, pharmaceutical, and critical industry projects. European actors have signaled readiness to channel hundreds of billions of dollars into U.S. energy, infrastructure, and technology investments over time. These flows already resemble a distributed sovereign consortium centered on the United States. As the formal sovereign fund takes shape, that consortium will likely be channeled through more coherent vehicles.