Veriton Investment

Housing Chief Bill Pulte Becomes a Potential Liability for Donald Trump

(Bloomberg) — Bill Pulte has made a name for himself by slinging dirt at Donald Trump’s foes — but some of the president’s aides now fear he isn’t up to doing his job: overseeing the $13 trillion US mortgage market.

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When Pulte was picked to take the helm of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which regulates mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Trump transition team considered the posting more of a backwater, according to people familiar with the process.

Yet housing sits atop a list of grievances many voters have about the high cost of living, and that’s left some Trump confidantes seeing Pulte and his unorthodox approach to his role as a liability.

Trump’s advisers during the transition viewed the FHFA as less important than other postings dealing with higher-priority issues such as immigration and tariffs, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private deliberations. Pulte was tapped for the FHFA job after being passed over for top posts at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the people said.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy a large chunk of US home loans and help banks keep financing flowing to borrowers. The president is weighing plans to sell shares in the firms to the public, a move that could come next year. The administration sees an offering as a way to raise money while boosting competition and potentially lowering costs in the long run. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the companies have been under US control.

Some prominent investors are worried that now isn’t the right time for the sale. Billionaire Bill Ackman, who has said his investment firm owns shares of Fannie and Freddie, said on X on Tuesday that it “will take significant time” for the government to “deliberately execute.” Part of that time will be spent getting buy-in from investors, Ackman said.

Fannie and Freddie have stronger governance today than at any time in their long history, an FHFA spokesperson said in an email.

Pulte, a 37-year-old heir to a construction-industry fortune, solidified his standing in Trump circles by joining Mar-a-Lago and trading on his family’s legacy to build a rapport with the real estate developer-turned-president, according to Trump advisers and allies.

Pulte’s experience in his family’s housing business was relatively brief, having served four years on the homebuilder’s board. He was much better known for his online presence: Years ago, he built a following on X casting himself as a “Twitter philanthropist,” handing out cash to followers. More recently, he’s used social media to lambast Trump enemies.

Some of that attack-dog persona has carried over from the online realm. Earlier this year, Pulte was seen waiting outside the Oval Office with a posterboard depicting Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other people in Trump’s orbit as thwarting the president’s agenda from within, according to people familiar with the matter.

An FHFA spokesperson denied the incident took place and said that Pulte and Bessent have a good working relationship.

There have been other reports of tension between Pulte and the Treasury secretary. Bessent allegedly threatened to punch Pulte in the face at a dinner event, Politico reported. Bessent has declined to comment on the episode, though he has joked when asked about his dynamic with Pulte that

Pulte has kept his job despite the frustrations of many of Trump’s top aides because the president himself likes Pulte’s pit-bull approach, according to Trump advisers and allies. One Trump ally said sarcastically that Pulte is the highest-profile FHFA official the government has ever had.

“Bill Pulte is a loyal and trusted member of President Trump’s team, and he is doing a great job,” said Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary. “The housing and mortgage market is moving in the right direction, and mortgages are trending downward under President Trump and Director Pulte’s leadership. The president and Director Pulte and the rest of the Trump administration are working hard to make housing affordable to all Americans.”

Housing has become a critical issue for the president, with Democrats winning key state and local elections this month in part by criticizing Trump’s economic stewardship.

“One of the things we’re spending a lot of time on is thinking about the state of housing in America,” Kevin Hassett, the director of Trump’s National Economic Council, said last week at the Economic Club of Washington. Hassett said policymakers would be making recommendations to Trump in the next few weeks and months.

Pulte has blasted Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for not cutting interest rates more quickly, echoing complaints by Trump that high rates have impeded homebuying. But Pulte’s X posts and frequent TV appearances taking aim at Powell, along with his penchant for developing policy ideas on his own, have annoyed several senior administration officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

One concern among some top executives in the housing industry is that Pulte could be a turnoff for potential investors in Fannie and Freddie, according to people familiar with the matter, after his surprise policy announcements, a spate of firings and his focus on mortgage-fraud accusations have created the perception of instability or distraction. Pulte recently appointed himself chairman of both Fannie and Freddie’s boards.

To keep the stock offering on track, the Trump administration brought in seasoned officials from other parts of the government, including Mark Calabria, an Office of Management and Budget official who led FHFA in Trump’s first term. The group was called in because some officials worried Pulte lacks a detailed understanding of housing policy, Bloomberg has previously reported.

Pulte played a limited role in recent meetings FHFA and Treasury held with housing advocates, think tanks and mortgage-industry representatives about the stock sales, according to participants who declined to be identified. In one case, Pulte spoke only at the beginning of a call after listening to other officials praise his leadership, the participants said.

An FHFA spokesperson said Pulte participated in person in multiple stakeholder meetings in Washington and at Fannie and Freddie offices in Virginia.

Online History

Pulte’s history online was a target of scrutiny by Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat, who claimed in a letter that Pulte had deleted more than 25,000 posts on his X account and requested access to them before the Banking Committee voted on his nomination. Pulte ignored the request, according to a Warren aide.

Prior to his nomination, Pulte had also emerged as a meme-stock influencer. In a video posted to Reddit of a 2023 meme-stock event in Florida, Pulte is presented with a trophy inscribed, “Bill Pulte f—.” The other side bears the phrase “only the young,” a rallying cry among some investors in meme stocks.

“I like ‘only the young,’” Pulte says in the video, adding, “That looks pretty badass.”

The video of the event, which Pulte helped organize, shows other bawdy moments, including a man who couldn’t be identified being slapped in the face with a neon-green sex toy.

Pulte is the grandson of William Pulte — the founder of PulteGroup Inc. and a figure admired by Trump, according to Trump advisers. William Pulte died in 2018.

The younger Pulte served on PulteGroup’s board of directors from 2016 to 2020. In 2011, he started a private equity firm and invested in heating and air-conditioning businesses, and he reported a net worth of at least $190 million in disclosure forms ahead of his confirmation hearings.

Though he is one of more than two dozen grandchildren, Pulte has cast himself as the true heir to William Pulte’s legacy. He published a book in 2022 sharing aphorisms from his grandfather and recounting time they spent together. The same image of Pulte with his grandfather was reproduced on nearly every other page. Pulte started a firm called the Pulte Family Office that has issued statements signed by “the Pulte Family.”

Pulte’s ties to his family and the family business are complicated, with a history of legal battles. In one 2022 case, Pulte sued a PulteGroup executive for allegedly using a network of Twitter bots to defame and harass him. The case was dismissed this year. In a motion related to the case, Pulte’s aunt, Nancy Rickard, who wasn’t a party to the suit, accused Pulte of “repeated, degrading, and threatening harassment” of her over several years.

Rickard, one of 14 children of William Pulte, runs the Pulte Family Charitable Foundation, which in 2023 issued a statement distancing other family members from Bill Pulte. Rickard and a spokesperson for the foundation declined to comment.

Housing Overhaul

Since taking the helm of FHFA, Pulte has sought to put his stamp on the agency, including by trying to rebrand FHFA, changing its letterhead to “U.S. Federal Housing” and referring to himself as the Director of US Federal Housing. Only Congress, which established FHFA in 2008, has the power to officially change the agency’s name. An agency spokesperson said FHFA shifted away from bureaucratic acronyms to focus on its housing mission.

Pulte has backed a range of ideas for overhauling the US housing market, frequently taking his cues from Trump, who proposes ideas on social media. But many of them have quickly faded or been resisted by the industry.

Pulte amplified Trump’s suggestion that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should help stimulate homebuilding, though it was unclear how that would work. FHFA is studying all options to lower housing costs, an agency spokesperson said.

Earlier this month, Pulte posted on X that he is “evaluating portable mortgages,” and endorsed the idea of 50-year mortgages as a way to lower monthly payments. Critics were quick to point out pitfalls of the latter: Longer-maturity loans could increase the total interest homeowners pay, slow the accumulation of equity and even drive up housing prices.

It wasn’t long before Trump himself was downplaying the potential impact of the 50-year mortgage, mere days after Pulte had heralded it as a “game changer.”

“It’s not even a big deal,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News that aired last week. “All it means is you pay less per month. You pay it over a longer period of time. It’s not like a big factor.”