Bill Pulte, President Trump’s top housing official, has voiced grand ambitions for jump-starting the housing market by lowering interest rates, boosting home construction and reshaping the federally controlled mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
With his appointment on Tuesday as the acting director of national intelligence, Mr. Pulte will now also vet national security threats.
Already, Mr. Pulte’s tenure as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency was marked by a lot of talk and theatrics but few tangible results. With his new unusual dual role, housing advocates said they expected his housing agenda to slow even more.
“It suggests that, for the time being anyway, any efforts that require a heavy lift from F.H.F.A. will have to wait,” said Jim Parrott, a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute and an adviser on housing finance issues.
Mr. Pulte, 38, is a grandson of the founder of PulteGroup, one of the nation’s largest home-building companies, and served on its board for about four years before his fellow members pushed him out. But he has had little day-to-day experience in the housing world outside of owning several small mobile home parks in Florida and a number of single-family rental homes.
At the housing agency, Mr. Pulte has shaken up the staff, firing people in large groups. Teams focusing on fair-lending enforcement and climate risk were cut or merged with others.
Mr. Pulte also de-emphasized Fannie and Freddie’s mission of expanding homeownership to historically underserved populations. He canceled support for a program aimed at catering to people of color, for example, and lowered the targets for the share of loans to low-income home buyers that Fannie and Freddie try to acquire.
Neither Mr. Pulte nor a spokesperson for the Federal Housing Finance Agency responded to requests for comment.
Under Mr. Pulte’s tenure, the administration’s lofty goals for the housing market have yet to materialize. Early on, he was able to hail falling mortgage rates, which helped make buying homes slightly less formidable. A decision he made to have Fannie and Freddie buy hundreds of billions of dollars more in mortgage securities had some initial success in bringing down rates, but prices have remained stubbornly high.
Rates on a 30-year mortgage, as tracked by Freddie Mac, have been rising during the war with Iran and now sit about where they were last summer.
The difficulty of purchasing a home, particularly for first-time buyers, has helped drive down Mr. Trump’s approval ratings on the economy. And housing starts have remained subdued since interest rates soared in 2022.
At one point, Mr. Pulte floated the idea of creating a 50-year mortgage in a bid to spur homeownership, but both progressives and conservatives panned the idea. Critics said the interest payments would last so long that they would eat into a homeowner’s life savings.
One of Mr. Pulte’s signature proposals is launching an initial public offering of Fannie and Freddie, which buy mortgages from banks and package them into bonds that are sold to investors. Controlled by the federal government since the financial crisis nearly 18 years ago, the companies are two of the most important cogs in the nation’s roughly $17 trillion mortgage market.
Mr. Pulte began talking up an I.P.O. last summer after Mr. Trump teased the idea in several social media posts. In October, Mr. Pulte said the I.P.O. could happen by the end of the year, though he added that the final decision rested with the president.
The plan has not moved forward, in part because of uncertainty over whether Fannie and Freddie would remain under government control and the effect the plan might have on mortgage rates.
Shares in Fannie and Freddie have dropped steeply in over-the-counter trading over the past year, and sank further on the news of Mr. Pulte’s intelligence role.
Investors have been leery of Mr. Pulte’s position as both the housing agency director and chair of Fannie and Freddie, an arrangement that had not happened under previous directors. Adding another job title may only further cloud the issue of corporate independence.
His tenure at the Federal Housing Finance Agency has also been known for his fiery posts on social media, a habit that began before he joined the administration. Weeks after becoming the nation’s housing director, Mr. Pulte launched a social media campaign against Jerome H. Powell, then the chair of the Federal Reserve. He frequently called on Mr. Powell to resign and blamed him for making the housing unaffordable.
Mr. Pulte also went on a crusade against Lisa Cook, a Fed governor, demanding that the Justice Department investigate her on allegations of mortgage fraud. Ms. Cook has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
