Getting straight answers (or any answers at all) from Washington about our hoard of gold is weirdly difficult. Yes, the government can downsize its holdings, said Congressman Brad Sherman, a member of the Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology, through a spokesman. No, it’s not a good idea, he added, offering no elaboration. When I called to interview the subcommittee’s chairman, Representative Mel Watt, his office begged off in an e-mail, advising only that he “hadn’t studied this particular issue as of yet.”

Repeated calls and e-mails to the White House press office went unanswered. The Treasury Department referred me to the section on gold in the U.S. Code. When I pressed for more information, a public-affairs official e-mailed back: “Gold? Don’t you have anything better to write about[?]”

“I don’t think that any change in the gold policy is even on the screen,” said Dale Henderson, a visiting professor of economics at Georgetown University. “It’s a bit of a mystery to me.” As a research economist at the Federal Reserve, Henderson co-authored a study in 1997 called “Can Government Gold Be Put to Better Use?” Yes, the paper concluded: selling or loaning out some or all of the reserves is preferable to doing nothing. “It’s an opportunity cost for the government,” Henderson told me. “The country has this gold and is borrowing to finance its activities. If we’re trying to maximize the return on the country’s assets, then we should borrow a little less and sell some of the gold.”

Under current law, income from the sale of gold must be used to reduce the national debt. But nothing would stop Congress from rewriting the regulation to permit other uses. By Washington’s corpulent spending standards, $300 billion may seem modest, but it’s hardly trivial: it could, for example, reduce our $1.3 trillion budget deficit by more than 20 percent; finance Social Security for nearly six months; or fund unemployment benefits for several years—in effect, create a stimulus package without pushing us further into debt.

So why hasn’t the U.S. cashed in, as several European central banks have done recently? For one thing, the Federal Reserve’s ability to print money at will—despite the risk of inflation—makes the case for selling gold less persuasive, explained Martin Murenbeeld, a veteran gold analyst and the chief economist at DundeeWealth. And some analysts worry that selling gold would be seen as a frantic effort by Washington to balance its deficit-laden budget. In turn, the market might demand higher yields on Treasury bonds, thereby minimizing if not overwhelming the revenue gains from liquidating gold.

Barry Bosworth, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former economic adviser in the Carter administration, said that the wisdom of selling would depend on what the government did with the proceeds. Reducing the nation’s gold stock to finance, say, an increase in the strategic petroleum reserve might be savvy, he said, depending on the future price of oil. But selling gold, or any other national asset, to fund consumption just looks like a “gimmick.”