Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
If you had never heard of the Federal Housing Finance Agency—a small niche of the government that oversees much of the mortgage industry—this might be the week that put the FHFA on your radar, all because of its director, a 37-year-old official named Bill Pulte who was this week’s Washington Main Character (Non-Epstein Division).
Over the past few days, news stories have revealed a slew of criticisms and even an agency investigation into the dubious moves he has made in recent months as he has tried to ingratiate himself with President Donald Trump, including claims that he fired more than a dozen ethics staff who questioned his actions and that he presented bad ideas to the president that have embarrassed the White House.
Pulte arrived at his job running the FHFA amid a flurry of criticisms that he is both a “nepobaby” and unqualified for the job. Pulte is an heir to a real estate and construction fortune and has no professional experience in the mortgage industry he is now tasked with supervising. Yet since taking over the FHFA this spring, he has anointed himself as something of a mortgage fraud expert, digging up old documents and using them to accuse the president’s political foes—from New York Attorney General Letitia James to California Sen. Adam Schiff and Fed governor and economist Lisa Cook—of financial crimes to his millions of Twitter followers, before referring them to the Justice Department for investigation. All of the people he’s accused of such crimes are prominent Democrats, even as journalists revealed that mortgage data points to similar errors committed by three GOP officials in Trump’s Cabinet.
Pulte’s claims made news—Trump even used the accusations against Cook to fire her from job at the Federal Reserve, a move she is now contesting before the US Supreme Court. Still, though none of Pulte’s allegations became criminal charges (Letitia James is now facing a claim unrelated to what Pulte dug up), they begged the question of how Pulte was accessing the private data behind his accusations.
During the recent government shutdown, Pulte flew down to Trump’s Palm Beach golf club to present his idea for the president’s demand: a 50-year mortgage.
This week, the Wall Street Journal revealed that an ethics team at Fannie Mae, one of the mortgage giants Pulte oversees, had begun to investigate exactly this question. They started because some of their internal staff had expressed concern that senior leaders at the FHFA were pushing them to improperly access mortgage loan paperwork. The ethics watchdog then escalated their inquiry to the internal oversight office at the FHFA, who passed it federal prosecutors.
Not long after all this, many of the people who had touched the investigation got fired, including a dozen members of the Fannie Mae watchdog team, its chief ethics officer, and the top investigative official at the FHFA who had alerted prosecutors to the ongoing inquiry. Yet Pulte claimed the Fannie layoffs were merely part of a bid to end DEI programs.
This week, the Associated Press revealed that around the same time that this probe was ramping up in October, Pulte was making other questionable moves at Fannie Mae. Emails show that he asked the company’s head of marketing, a confidant of his, to share confidential pricing information with officials at Freddie Mac, Fannie’s main competitor, in a move that could open up Fannie Mae to allegations of collusion to fix mortgage rates. When senior officials at Fannie Mae questioned the conduct, they, too, were fired.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, Trump directed Pulte to think about ways to use Fannie and Freddie to ramp up housing production and address the country’s critical housing shortage. During the recent government shutdown, Pulte flew down to Trump’s Palm Beach golf club to present his idea for the president’s demand: a 50-year mortgage. Politico reported this week that Pulte went to Trump with a 3-foot-by-5-foot posterboard that discussed the idea in a few pictures and captions, and claimed if Trump did this, he would be among the “Great American Presidents.” Ten minutes later, Trump took to Truth Social to post in support of the idea, with a photo of the poster itself. Soon, the White House was flooded with calls pillorying the idea: a 50-year-mortgage could actually make the housing crisis worse, and raise costs to households in the long run.
“The thing that became clear from this latest episode—if it wasn’t already clear—is that Bill Pulte doesn’t know the first fucking thing about how the mortgage markets operate,” one person who was familiar with what happened told Politico. “After publicly humiliating the president with his moronic 50-year mortgage plan it’s safe to assume that his days are numbered.”
None of these criticisms or revelations have seemed to slow Pulte, or make him question his actions: The day after the Wall Street Journal revealed the probe looking into how Pulte is accessing private mortgage data, the FHFA director accused yet another prominent Trump critic, California Rep. Eric Swalwell, of—guess what?—mortgage fraud.
