The newly appointed head of one of the nation’s top housing regulators tightened his grip on the agency with a major board shake-up on Monday at two government-controlled mortgage finance firms.
William Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, ousted 14 board members at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and named himself chairman of both companies’ boards.
The last two F.H.F.A directors did not sit on the boards of Fannie and Freddie, the two firms that help drive the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market. The F.H.F.A. is the primary regulator for Fannie and Freddie, which have been under federal government control since the 2008 financial crisis.
Some see the board shake-ups as a move by Mr. Pulte to quiet potential dissent to any future job cuts at Fannie and Freddie, which in total employ about 15,000 people, or changes in housing policy.
“You want to get rid of people on the board who might make noise,” said Christopher Whalen, chairman of Whalen Global Advisors, which specializes in analyzing and consulting on financial institutions. “The people who are left, they trust.”
One of the new directors Mr. Pulte named to the Fannie board is Christopher Stanley, an executive at Elon Musk’s SpaceX who is working with Mr. Musk and his group, the Department of Government Efficiency, in efforts to downsize the federal work force. Mr. Stanley did not respond to a request for comment.
“Sure feels like they are laying the groundwork for a DOGE-like intervention,” said Jim Parrott, a mortgage finance expert and a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank.
An F.H.F.A. spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Pulte is a grandson of William Pulte, who died in 2018 and was the founder of PulteGroup, one of country’s largest home builders.
A day after being sworn in as director of the housing agency on Friday, Mr. Pulte posted on X, “Make Mortgages Great Again.”
He also appeared on a Fox News program to highlight empty offices at Fannie and Freddie, claiming it showed that many employees at the two companies had not returned to the office for work. Mr. Pulte reposted a video link to the segment on X.
His appearance on Fox has set off concern about mass firings at the firms, said one Fannie employee who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Fannie and Freddie do not actually make any home loans. Rather, they buy mortgages from banks and package them into securities that are sold to big investors. In creating those mortgage-backed securities, Fannie and Freddie guarantee them for bond investors, which include pensions, insurers, hedge funds and even the Federal Reserve.
In buying mortgages and bundling them into bonds, Fannie and Freddie free up capital for the banks, which enables them to write more mortgages. And that, in theory, helps keep rates on a 30-year mortgage in check.
In fall 2008, at the start of the financial crisis, the federal government was forced to bail out Fannie and Freddie as bond investors worried about the two companies’ abilities to keep insuring mortgages against the risk of default. The companies technically were taken over by the Treasury Department and the F.H.F.A., which was created to serve as Fannie and Freddie’s regulator.
Some investors and officials are pushing the Trump administration to release Fannie and Freddie from government control and restore their independence as publicly traded companies. Both Mr. Pulte and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have said they favor ending the government conservatorship, but they have also said they would not rush into any decision that might push up mortgage rates
The current rate on a 30-year mortgage, the most popular home loan in the United States, is around 6.7 percent.
