FHFA head overhauls Fannie, Freddie boards, makes himself chair 

William Pulte, sworn in last week as the new leader of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has said that privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac isn't a top priority.

But Pulte has moved quickly to reshape the boards of these mortgage stalwarts, appointing himself as chairman of both while ousting 14 board members and adding seven new ones, according to regulatory filings Monday.

One of those new board members is Christopher Stanley, a cybersecurity engineer at two Elon Musk-owned companies — SpaceX and X — who has been working with the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency. Stanley will be paid $160,000 annually to serve on the board, SEC filings state.

More on Pulte: Bill Pulte is the founder of a private equity firm, an online philanthropist and an investor with holdings of $1 million to $5 million in X. He is the grandson of William J. Pulte, who founded PulteGroup, the nation's third-largest residential construction company.

The new FHFA head is also an avid social media user, recently posting on X that he plans to "Make mortgages great again."

HUD, Interior announce plan to build homes on federal land

The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of the Interior are moving forward with a proposal to build affordable housing on federal land.

"Historically, building on federal land is a nightmare of red tape — lengthy environmental reviews, complex transfer protocols and disjointed agency priorities," HUD Secretary Scott Turner and Interior Secretary Doug Bergum said in a joint statement issued March 17. "This partnership will cut through the bureaucracy."

It's a tempting idea, with the nation facing a daunting housing supply gap. Developing even a fraction of the 650 million acres owned by the federal government could lead to millions of new homes, the Wall Street Journal reported.

But even those who support the concept are not convinced it will be as easy as the Trump administration hopes, with plenty of local roadblocks — from labor shortages to zoning laws — standing in the way of federal plans. 

Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii, told the Journal that it's "a good idea" to build more housing on land owned by the government. "But the problem with housing policy is that politicians want a magic housing button that they can press. And that's not how this works," Schatz said.

HUD putting 'lives at risk,' Democrats say

While some Democratic lawmakers are supportive of HUD's federal lands proposal, others have expressed alarm about the agency's plans to cut $30 million in grants and 77% of the staff at the HUD office that enforces the Fair Housing Act, saying those cuts will put "people's lives at risk."

Senator Elizabeth Warren told the New York Times that in addition to attacking the nation's housing shortage, "we should attack housing discrimination head-on." Warren joined Representative Maxine Watters in delivering a letter signed by 108 Congressional Democrats to Turner.

A HUD rep decried the lawmakers' "false accusations," saying HUD would enforce the Civil Rights Act, "which prohibits discrimination in HUD-assisted programs." 

CFPB continues critical work, gets some employees back

Meanwhile, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau continues to cling to life, buoyed by unexpected support from the mortgage industry and some favorable judicial actions.

Lenders pushed back on the elimination of a CFPB-compiled interest rate — something they use to determine if their loans comply with safe-lending rules — which you can learn more about on a website that looks like a time capsule from the turn of the millennium.

Without this rate, "the mortgage market would freeze," the New York Times reported. So some employees who had previously been ordered to stop work were allowed to keep the lights on, at least for that function, while the courts sort out the bigger picture.

A Maryland District Court judge ruled last week that probationary employees at the CFPB and 17 other agencies were unlawfully let go and needed to be reinstated. At the CFPB, this led to the reinstatement of 70 of probationary employees, as well as up to 100 "term" employees hired for specific projects or time frames, according to Bloomberg Law.