Bill Pulte was making his latest stop on a national tour.
On stage at the Times Square Marriott Marquis, the almost 37-year-old director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency was there to dish on his first weeks on the job. He’d also appeared on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox News’ the Ingraham Hour and at the Milken Institute Global Conference where he’d shared similar war tales.
Affable and telegenic, often in a royal blue suit, he’d flash pearly canines, call the interviewer by name and throw out a few anecdotes to describe how he’d been regulating and presiding over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the core of the gig.
Mostly, those stories showcased the “waste, fraud and abuse” he’d uncovered. He’d found trays of caramel popcorn in the cafeterias of Freddie Mac with no one there to eat it and discovered “North Koreans and Chinese” posing as “real Americans” working in the government-sponsored enterprises. He’d “criminally referred them to the Justice Department.”
Pulte had overhauled the workforces at both companies and FHFA, the agency that oversees the GSEs, waving goodbye to Freddie’s CEO, 25 percent of FHFA and over a dozen board members across Fannie and Freddie. (He said he’d considered firing everyone.) He explained the shakeup as a route to “in real time, turn these businesses around: get rid of the bloat, get rid of the inefficiency.”
He’d appointed himself chair to both companies — a move observers flagged as a way to control the boards if privatization succeeded. Some elected officials called it illegal overreach.
He’d also fired more than 100 employees at Fannie, alleging unethical conduct, namely, fraud, and called everyone else back to work five days a week. And no, he had not had any help from the Department of Government Efficiency.
The employees loved him for it, he said.
“When I walk through the hallways, people are saying, ‘Thank you,’” Pulte told Mike Piwowar at the Milken Institute Global Conference in early May. “They’re asking for selfies.”
“That’s great,” Piwowar said. Then he asked the question on everyone’s lips: What were Pulte’s plans to remove the GSEs from conservatorship?
“I think it needs to be, you know, very seriously looked at,” the director said.
“I will not be dead so long as my grandson Bill is alive.”
The response had become a refrain. No interviewer, this one included, had been able to get a straight answer on privatization, arguably the most consequential policy issue under Pulte’s control.
The shift, which would be seismic, could lower mortgage rates and spur new loan products through renewed competition. Or it could rupture the mortgage market and make the housing affordability crisis worse.
And yet, here on the Marriott stage at the Mortgage Bankers Association conference a few weeks after Milken, Lennar Mortgage President Laura Escobar gave the question the old college try. She had to.
“We’ll see what happens,” the director said. He then deferred to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who’d play a role in the decision: “We meet regularly about this and every other topic, frankly, but not just this topic and, you know, we will stay in constant contact.”
And ultimately, he punted to President Donald Trump.
“That will be the boss’s decision,” he said.
On May 21, “the boss” spoke.
“I am giving very serious consideration to bringing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac public,” Trump posted on Truth Social, writing that he would speak with cabinet members and make a decision “in the near future.”
I texted Pulte. He is casual with communication, and we’d been chatting on and off for about a month. Given the president’s statement, I asked, was privatization now a priority?
Forever conservatorship
Privatization of Fannie and Freddie has been on Trump’s to-do list since his first term.
Back in 2008, when the housing market was careening, the government created the FHFA to seize the companies, backstop them and stabilize the housing market.
But conservatorship wasn’t supposed to drag on forever, Trump 1.0 argued. It was killing competition and using taxpayers as a fail-safe. There was too much government in housing finance for the administration’s taste.
In late 2018, Trump brought in Mark Calabria, a GSE critic and advocate for reform, to head up the FHFA. The agency and the Treasury penned a plan to end conservatorship that would boost Fannie and Freddie’s capital buffers and cut their footprint so private firms could have more room to play.
FHFA even finalized a framework that allowed the GSEs to keep more of their earnings so they could hit the capital levels Calabria said they’d need to operate sans government guarantee: 4.25 percent of their total adjusted assets, instead of 2.5 percent or $283 billion, instead of $23.5 billion. (Bigger books and a broader definition of assets also accounted for the surge.)
Policy wonks eviscerated the plan: The levels were excessive, rates would rise on the heightened cost of capital and the companies would be less profitable once set free.
Eventually, the push to end conservatorship sputtered out.
Congress, key to legally reforming the GSEs, wouldn’t back it; investors had little confidence it would work; litigation loomed; and when President Joe Biden came in, the project fell apart. His FHFA director, Sandra Thompson, opposed privatization.
Meanwhile, the businesses boomed.
The housing market went Covid-era crazy, driving record prices and mortgage volumes.
Fannie and Freddie posted multi-billion-dollar profits in 2020 and 2021, largely thanks to the surge in refinancing fees. With higher home prices came higher conforming loan limits. For 2025, the GSEs expanded their market share to mortgages on single-family homes that sell for up to $806,500, or $1.2 million in high-cost areas.
They currently back or hold $7.9 trillion in loans — about half of all American mortgages.
Privatization 2.0
Conditions for an end to conservatorship are looking clearer this time around. The enterprises’ net worth has grown by tens of billions of dollars, the administration is ready to act without Congress’ blessing and investors are excitedly tweeting about initial public offerings.
After Trump’s initial Truth Social post, shares of Freddie jumped 42 percent and Fannie’s stock price surged 51 percent — both hitting highs they hadn’t reached since 2008. Fannie’s stock price surged 51 percent — its best day since August 2008.
Exuberance aside, the risks of privatization are still there, namely higher mortgage rates in a market where borrowing and buying are expensive enough as is.
Pulte has addressed those threats. Lowering mortgage rates and improving affordability are two goals he’s eager to speak on. They’re also achievable through easier means like boosting supply, a solution that has some fans.
“President Trump is right to free Fannie and Freddie,” Gary LaBarbera, who heads New York’s Building and Construction Trades Council and serves on the Housing for U.S. coalition, said. “Let’s use the proceeds — some $250 billion — to build middle-class housing for American workers by American workers.”
Pulte, a man intimately familiar with American homebuilding, said the country should be “getting more housing supply.”
But there are other factors driving the FHFA director’s decisions these days.
Pulte is a young guy in a new job that the president gave him. It’s a stage set for him to prove himself.
“We’re going to make Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac great again,” Pulte said at Milken, echoing the title-case tweets on his very popular X account.
Homebuilder heart
Pulte doesn’t just care about housing affordability, it’s in his blood.
His grandfather founded PulteGroup, the third largest homebuilder in the country, and a key purveyor of the American Dream.
William J. Pulte became a billionaire by streamlining construction and focusing on master-planned developments to expand access to homeownership.
The grandson with his name grew up in Boca Raton, Florida, flying helicopters for fun. It gave him a macro perspective — “big time.”
He went to Northwestern for broadcast journalism, an itch his current TV appearances seem to scratch, then launched his own firm, Pulte Capital, a year out of college with a few loans — one from his dad, who builds luxury homes at his firm Mark Timothy Incorporated — and a $575,000 investment from an unspecified source. Pulte Capital invests in building products.
“I made most of my money in air conditioning, of all things,” Pulte told me on a gray mid-May morning at the FHFA offices in Washington, D.C. He’d squeezed me in during the busy few weeks bookended by Milken and the Mortgage Bankers conference.
He “didn’t get a nickel” from his grandfather until the homebuilder died in 2018. Then he got $15 million — the only descendant of 14 children and 25 grandchildren to make it into the will.
“I think we should question the sort of fascination, sort of obsession with releasing the GSEs in the first place.”
“What an honor, right?” he said. “I didn’t even know he was going to leave it.”
It’s not a total surprise. Grandfather Pulte was a Detroit-based philanthropist and the pair co-founded the Detroit Blight Authority, a nonprofit that clears abandoned buildings. Pulte also helped his grandfather oust PulteGroup’s CEO in 2016, then joined the board. In 2020, he left amid disagreements with the other boardmembers.
“They were worried that, in particular, I would kick out the CEO, because I kicked out the other CEO,” Pulte said.
“They said I left them in great standing,” he added.
He believes that his grandfather, if he were still alive, would be proud of him.
On his deathbed, William Pulte allegedly told his priest, “I will not be dead so long as my grandson Bill is alive.” The priest shared the sentiment with Pulte at his grandfather’s wake, he said.
Less than a decade later, married and with three — soon to be four — kids of his own, Pulte has skyrocketed in rank and achieved a sort of full-circle moment, now overseeing the industry that made the Pulte family what it is.
“I feel like I’ve fulfilled everything that he would want,” Pulte said, gazing out the window of his eighth-floor office.
The Twitter philanthropist
Pulte has a background in housing; he understands mortgage rates and recessionary risk and appreciates the roles of Fannie and Freddie, but he’s not a policy wonk.
During a meeting with Redwood Trust, which I unexpectedly attended, he asked executives about “his authority” and “legal right” to pass on loans above a certain size — which members of the mortgage REIT’s C-suite suggested he might try.
He got to the FHFA by way of X when it was still Twitter. Much like the guy who gave him his job, he’s got a knack for social media and the confidence to make connections.
“So how can we help you guys?” Pulte later asked Redwood’s execs.
Twitter is where Pulte differentiated himself from the family. He wasn’t just born into wealth, he was an innovator, someone to watch.
In the late 2010s, he started giving out tens of thousands of dollars to folks in need: those with medical bills, rental arrears or child support.
The tweet that changed his life went up in July 2019. He pledged to donate $30,000 to a U.S. veteran if first-term Trump retweeted him. Trump did, Pulte donated and his follower count soared.
The director had made Forbes’ 30 under 30 list a few years prior for his work with the Detroit Blight Authority and Pulte Capital, but the so-called Twitter Philanthropy he developed was, in many ways, his big break.
Pulte told me he “knew of” the president before the retweet, and when pressed, he said he’d met him. But the exchange confirmed publicly that he was on Trump’s radar.
So, when Pulte “reached out after the [2024] election and said, ‘I’d love to be involved,’” he nabbed the nomination.
Had he envisioned a different role? FHFA director isn’t a cabinet position and doesn’t carry the weight of Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, whose office sits across the street from Pulte’s and which he was eyeing, the New York Post reported.
“I would have been open to serving in anything, but I was definitely excited for this role,” he said.
“This is a big role; I think we’re elevating this role to a whole new level now just by virtue of doing our job, which is acting as conservator and regulators,” he added.
Not just
But Pulte isn’t just acting as conservator and regulator.
He’s enacting change that aligns with Trump’s DOGE-ian efforts, and he’s making sure his 2.9 million X followers, mortgage market stakeholders, the public and the president know.
Fraud, a DOGE focus, has been all over @pulte’s timeline.
The news was an “AI-powered Crime Detection Unit” that would root out mortgage fraud, according to the press release. Palantir, a firm criticized for privacy breaches and surveillance practices, would provide the AI.
The type of mortgage fraud he’s working to root out, though, isn’t so clear.
He referred New York Attorney General Letitia James to the Department of Justice for alleged occupancy fraud — misrepresenting a second home as a primary residence to get better loan terms. And he told Milken’s Piwowar that fraud is being “understated on the residential side.”
He’s also acknowledged multifamily fraud as a problem, particularly “people flipping properties to their friends.” The Real Deal has covered those schemes extensively, and the GSEs in April placed eight investors on a blacklist.
But when I asked Pulte if he might expand the blacklist, he kept the answer surface level.
“I’ve instructed [the GSEs] to make sure that they communicate where there are risky loans or risky properties,” Pulte said. “I think people can handle it if they just get communicated with; it’s when they don’t get communicated with that they think that they’re on some kind of blacklist.”
Watch me
Maybe the nitty gritty doesn’t matter when you’re climbing the ranks. Gaining power is about turning heads. And the industry is looking.
On the Ingraham Hour segment, he’d stalked the halls of Fannie and Freddie live with a TikTok mic, asking employees how much better work was now that he’d brought everyone back in.
At the Redwood meeting, Pulte diverged from the conversation about conforming loan limits to ask if the executives had seen him on Ingraham.
“We did, yeah.”
When the REIT’s CEO, Christopher Abate, praised the pace of change at FHFA, Pulte asked: “Do you follow my Twitter?”
“We follow your Twitter, yeah.”
And when Abate mentioned Annaly, another public REIT whom both Pulte and the Redwood CEO had talked to recently, Pulte cast about for details: “What’d they say about the meeting?”
The regulatory web entrapping Fannie and Freddie is undeniably headspinning. “Complicated” is a go-to descriptor for the public-private hybrids.
It’s easy to get lost in the minutiae. It’s also easy to fly the helicopter so high you see only the sweep.
But specifics are crucial when you’re trying to pull off a feat that foiled Calabria, an economics PhD with decades of experience in housing finance and government, and when weighty voices are advising against it.
“I think we should question the sort of fascination, sort of obsession with releasing the GSEs in the first place,” Libby Cantrill, PIMCO’s head of public policy, said at the mortgage conference the day after Pulte spoke.
“We don’t understand what objective it would actually achieve from a policymaker perspective,” she said.
Cantrill argued that the market was liquid enough as is, which was keeping mortgage rates low, and that it was easier to shrink the government’s footprint while Fannie and Freddie remained in conservatorship — Calabria had curbed vacation home loans and cash-out refinancings, for example.
And last, protecting taxpayers, which the administration cares about, is easier if the entities have a government backstop. If they’re private and the market, again, crashes, “you would be socializing losses and privatizing gains.”
Pulte may not have heard. His schedule, he told me, was jam-packed with meetings with the DOJ or Federal Bureau of Investigation about the fraud he continues to unearth.
After Trump’s May 21 Truth Social post, Pulte also stopped replying to my questions about whether he was still prioritizing operational efficiency or putting all focus on the privatization question.
It’s anyone’s guess whether Trump will follow through on his proposed timeline and make a decision in the “near future.” “I am working on TAKING THESE AMAZING COMPANIES PUBLIC,” Trump wrote on Truth Social May 27, tempering the urgency with auxiliary verbs.
The president, in his post, did promise the government would “keep its implicit GUARANTEES.”
“I will stay strong in my position on overseeing them as President,” he added, a more conservative approach that billionaire Bill Ackman has advocated for.
Clearly, Pulte isn’t the only decisionmaker in the potential end to conservatorship. But neither is Trump.
The Treasury needs to be on board, the Securities and Exchange Commission has to okay a public offering — among other bits and bobs — and Congress, really, should be in the room, experts argue, to pass a law that would cement the policy changes required to privatize.
Bessent, for his part, seems preoccupied.
“It is a goal for this administration, you know, again, we’re doing peace deals, tax deals, trade deals, so as we land some of those deals, then we will focus on that,” Bessent told Bloomberg a few days after Trump’s first Truth Social post.
He did stress that the Treasury was “studying” paths to privatization that would not widen mortgage spreads.
The SEC hasn’t said a word.
And Congress, in what figures to be another complication, does want in.
“We’ve talked for years about privatizing,” Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican, said. “I really think it’s time to take a good hard look. But I think Congress ought to be involved.”’
Hill Democrats, meanwhile, are preemptively pumping the brakes.
“The idea of a fire sale to simply grab dollars to pay for the crazy big, beautiful bill — I’ve got no interest in that,” Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat, weighed in, specifying he would back a “smart release plan that wouldn’t disrupt the market.”
If an exit goes awry, Pulte could be on the list of guys to blame. And Trump can be quick to point fingers.
For the grandson of the American Dream, the stakes are, then, threefold: remain in the president’s good graces, uphold the family name and keep the mortgage and housing markets humming along.
It’s a lot of pressure. And Pulte, two months into the job, still has not decided how to blow off steam.
“I unwind with what I do, you know?” he said.