A sweeping housing bill became law on Saturday without Donald Trump’s signature, or any White House fanfare, after the president soured on a package of dozens of affordability provisions that he derided as “a yawn.”
Trump’s scuttled support and the dead-of-night enactment are setbacks for his allies on Capitol Hill, who’d been looking to cast the law as a major bipartisan win on an issue voters are prioritizing heading into midterm elections.
The president’s turnabout also serves as a reminder of how quickly he can swerve on policy matters — even on a law that features provisions he and his own advisers negotiated. As recently as June, Trump hailed the package as “the most comprehensive and consequential housing legislation in the history of our country.”
The 21st Century Road to Housing Act will curb large institutional investors’ ownership of single-family homes, streamline rules around factory-built housing and encourage localities to remove barriers to construction in an attempt to bring more supply to the market.
Lawmakers had initially planned a splashy, camera-friendly signing in the Capitol for Trump in June of a package they’d spent months jockeying over. Trump then scrapped the ceremony at the last minute, saying the housing package “pales in comparison” to a voter-ID law he has championed. Trump on Friday again linked the bills: “I will not sign the Housing Bill, which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House, in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” he wrote on social media hours before the bill was set to become law.
Trump’s withdrawal from the planned June signing set the stage for an unusual waiting game in Washington: The president has 10 days, excluding Sundays, to sign or veto legislation once it’s been sent to their desk. If no action is taken, a bill becomes law at the end of that time.
That 10-day period expired Saturday, leaving the most consequential housing legislation in decades to become law in an uncommon way.
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The last time a law went into effect without a presidential signature was in 2016, according to data by GovTrack. President Barack Obama allowed the Iran Sanctions Extension Act to go into law without signing it, saying the measure was “unnecessary” but ultimately would not impact his nuclear deal with Iran.
Contentious Investor Ban
The housing bill’s champions have hailed it as a game-changer that will make meaningful strides toward alleviating a historic supply shortage and tempering price growth.
Still, industry experts expect the immediate impact to be muted, because expanding the supply of homes takes time.
One of the most consequential, and contentious, measures of the bill would bar institutional investors with more than 350 homes from purchasing additional single-family properties. The inclusion of that measure was critical to securing the White House’s support, according to Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican.
Trump surprised Wall Street when he first floated such an idea in January, declaring that “people live in homes, not corporations.”
Trump has vacillated wildly in the last year over the importance of bringing down housing costs, delivering both gauzy tributes to the American Dream of homeownership and caustic assessments that “the word ‘affordability’ is a con job by the Democrats” and “nobody” cares “about housing.”
In October, he accused homebuilders of behaving like a cartel to maintain artificial scarcity and said he was leaning on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to “get Big Homebuilders going.” On Jan. 7,he said owning a home had fallen “increasingly out of reach for far too many people,” and that he would be “calling on Congress to codify” a ban on large institutional investor purchases of single-family homes.
Less than a month later, he told Cabinet officials, “I don’t want to drive housing prices down, I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes” and assured homeowners that “we’re not going to destroy the value of their homes so that somebody that didn’t work very hard can buy a home.”
In February, Trump lamented during his State of the Union address that a “pillar of the American Dream that has been under attack is homeownership.” Days later, the White House released two executive orders aimed at increasing housing affordability and access to mortgage credit.
By the time the Road to Housing Act passed Congress, Trump was dismissing its supply-oriented provisions as of “minor importance” compared to interest rates.
Fraying Relationship
Trump tied his revocation of support for the housing legislation to a demand that Congress back a controversial voter-ID bill, ignoring warnings from Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, that he lacks the votes to pass it. The relationship between Trump and the GOP-led Senate has frayed in recent weeks, as retiring Republicans – including two whose primary challengers Trump backed – have grown bolder about bucking the White House.
In the last six weeks, GOP lawmakers axed $1 billion in funding for Trump’s new White House ballroom from an immigration spending bill and successfully pushed the administration to drop plans for a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund.
Lawmakers last month also attempted to do an end-run around Trump’s pick for acting spy chief by fast-tracking confirmation of a less controversial nominee – only for Trump to tell that nominee not to appear for his confirmation hearing at the last minute. A key spy powers authority expired in the impasse over the appointment.
Now Trump – a real estate mogul who built a brand by slapping his name on everything he touched – has chosen to let the biggest housing legislation in a generation pass into law without putting his signature on it. Lawmakers in both parties face the challenge of trying to sell the bill, whose benefits won’t kick in until well after the midterms, as a win for voters — without the images from a triumphant signing ceremony or the help of the president.
