Letting politics influence management decisions of the Alaska Permanent Fund is like inviting an acquaintance with COVID-19 to dinner. You may get lucky and nothing bad happens, but the possibilities for misery are real.

One of the tenets of an endowment fund is to minimize risk, or at least measure the risks against the potential gains. It’s unclear whether the Permanent Fund’s board of trustees were thinking about that when they voted 5-1 last week to fire Angela Rodell, who has served as executive director the past six years. During her tenure, the state’s main savings account grew...