Pulte Takes Top Spot In Fannie, Freddie Board Shake-Up, Adds Musk Ally
Bill Pulte isn’t wasting time.
Less than a week after being confirmed by the Senate to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Pulte has shaken up the board of directors at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, replacing several members and appointing himself the chairman of both firms.
Eight Fannie Mae board members left and four new ones will be added. One of the new members is a former SpaceX employee, and six departing Freddie Mac board members will be replaced by three new appointees along with Pulte.
The staffing changes were revealed in regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The self-appointment atop both boards is a departure from past FHFA director’s management decisions and was described as highly unusual by Politico.
The day after his confirmation on March 13, Pulte posted on social media that he and his team were beginning budget reviews at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which he said generate more than $30B in earnings per year.
The goal was “to help restore the American Dream for Americans who have been crushed these last four years,” he said.
The two agencies have conducted expansive fraud investigations in the last two years and have tightened oversight rules to help root out bad loans. Fannie Mae boosted its funds for losses to $725M in February and conceded in its annual report that it remained vulnerable to fraud from bad actors in the mortgage industry.
FHFA has overseen Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since the two secondary mortgage lenders nearly collapsed under the weight of the 2008 financial crisis. The two agencies, and other smaller federally backed lenders like Ginnie Mae, underpin both the residential and commercial U.S. mortgage markets by providing liquidity to lenders.
Pulte appointed Clinton Jones, Christopher Stanley and Michael Stucky to Fannie Mae's board of directors, with five former board members staying on into the next administration.
Jones currently serves as the FHFA general counsel and Stanley is a cybersecurity engineer at SpaceX and X, two companies owned by billionaire Elon Musk, who is tearing through Washington, D.C., with his Department of Government Efficiency.
Stanley's appointment gives Musk a key ally inside the government-backed lender at a time when allies of President Donald Trump are pushing his administration to end the government’s oversight of the firms.
At Freddie Mac, Brandon Hamara, Clinton Jones and Ralph Kittle were added to the board, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Pulte is the grandson of William Pulte, the founder of homebuilder PulteGroup. He was previously on the board but left the company and is better known for his social media presence. He gained popularity by paying for some of his followers' bills while boosting meme stocks like GameStop and Bed Bath & Beyond.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to Pulte ahead of his confirmation hearing asking for detailed answers about his position on releasing the lenders from conservatorship. He ultimately was approved by the Senate in a 56-43 vote.
After his confirmation, Pulte told CNN that the agencies “shouldn’t be in conservatorship forever,” but that an end to the oversight would happen slowly and with deliberation.
