Meecham and his co-workers have developed a theory of turbulence involving a truncated Wiener–Hermite expansion of the velocity field. The randomness is taken up by a white-noise function associated, in the original version of the theory, with the initial state of the flow. The mechanical problem then reduces to a set of coupled integro-differential equations for deterministic kernels. We have solved numerically an analogous set for Burgers's model equation and have computed, for the sake of comparison, actual random solutions of the Burgers equation. We find that the theory based on the first two terms of the Wiener–Hermite expansion predicts an insufficient rate of energy decay for Reynolds numbers larger than two, because the equations for the kernels contain no convolution integrals in wave-number space and therefore permit no cascade of energy. An energy cascade in wave-number space corresponds to a cascade up through successive terms of the Wiener-Hermite expansion. Pictures of the Gaussian and non-Gaussian components of an actual solution of the Burgers equation show directly that only higher-order terms in the Wiener–Hermite expansion are capable of representing shocks, which dissipate the energy. Higher-order terms would be needed even for a nearly Gaussian field of evolving three-dimensional turbulence. ‘Gaussianity’, in the experimentalist's sense, has no bearing on the rate of convergence of a Wiener–Hermite expansion whose white-noise function is associated with the initial state. Such an expansion would converge only if the velocity field and its initial state were joint-normally distributed. The question whether a time-varying white-noise function can speed the convergence is treated in the paper following this one.