On a Fox News segment that aired March 17, newly confirmed Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director Bill Pulte takes a Fox crew on a tour of Fannie Mae headquarters.
“We’ve got this big, beautiful area where employees are supposed to work. Nobody’s here,” Pulte says as he knocks on the window of an empty office. Cutting to Freddie Mac headquarters, the camera pans to reveal rows of empty cubicles.
Back in the Fox studio, Pulte tells host Laura Ingraham that there are 2,900 people who are supposed to work at the Fannie Mae office, but only 49 have been showing up full time.
It’s not clear when Pulte’s office tours took place, nor did the interview address remote work policies at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that collectively back most U.S. mortgages.
In the wake of Pulte’s Fox News appearance, Fannie and Freddie have been rocked by administrative shakeups. As head of the FHFA, which oversees those GSEs, Pulte already had broad powers to facilitate changes. Those powers increased when Pulte ousted 14 board members at the companies last week and installed himself as chairman of both boards.
Then, on March 20, Pulte fired Freddie Mac CEO Diana Reid and placed FHFA Chief Operating Officer Gina Cross and Human Resources Director Monica Mathews on leave.
According to The New York Times, the FHFA also put 35 of its own unionized employees on administrative leave last week. The Times further reported that Freddie Mac employees received an email notifying them that they would be required to work in the office five days a week starting May 1. Fannie Mae employees received a similar letter regarding an impending return-to-office policy, according to The Times.
In the midst of this upheaval, many industry observers have speculated that mass layoffs may occur at Fannie and Freddie.
Pulte sidestepped a question during the Fox News interview about whether Fannie and Freddie workers would be “getting DOGE’d” — a reference to the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency’s wholesale reductions of the federal workforce. “That’s a good question,” Pulte remarked before quickly redirecting the conversation.
A spokesperson for the FHFA declined to comment.
While Fannie and Freddie are sponsored by the government, they are publicly traded, shareholder-owned companies and are not federal agencies. According to SEC filings, Fannie Mae had 8,200 employees as of the end of 2024 and Freddie Mac had 8,076 full-time employees and 27 part-time workers as of Jan. 31.
The companies are also highly profitable, filings show. For 2024, net income at Fannie Mae was $17.0 billion and $11.9 billion at Freddie Mac.
Scott Olson, executive director of the Community Home Lenders of America (CHLA), said in an interview with Scotsman Guide that he thinks it is “premature to jump to any conclusions” about the implications of the board overhauls and leadership changes at the GSEs and their regulator. He said the CHLA is “focused on the policies, and that will be what’s important.”
The CHLA, which is a nonprofit association of small- and mid-sized community-based mortgage lenders, sent an open letter to Pulte on March 18 that commended his stance that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should not remain under FHFA conservatorship indefinitely. The letter also provided a series of recommendations, including that “Fannie and Freddie should maintain their affordable housing footprint, including condominium, investor and second home loans — without volume caps or fee increases unrelated to risk.”
Olson told Scotsman Guide that he hopes any additional changes at Fannie or Freddie will not impact their ability to work with a range of lenders.
“We want to make sure that if they cut staff, that it doesn’t come at any expense of reducing the number of approved seller-servicers, because that’s kind of the essence of what Fannie and Freddie are,” Olson said. “They really are an entity that creates access to the secondary markets for smaller lenders through the cash window, and their role is to serve a wide variety of lenders.”
