In a late afternoon post on X, Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director Bill Pulte announced Thursday that 62 employees had been fired from Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored mortgage investor regulated by the FHFA alongside Freddie Mac.

The post was one in a series underscoring Pulte’s efforts to weed out what he has termed “waste, fraud and abuse” and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies at the mortgage giants, in alignment with White House policy priorities and government downsizing efforts.

“Recently, I asked a Fannie Mae manager about dozens of employees at Fannie Mae and what they did during the day,” one post read. “The manager could not even tell me what his employees did. He then agreed to eliminate the positions. Wild!”

Pulte repeated a common refrain of the Trump administration in a subsequent post.

“RIP TO DEI AT FANNIE MAE,” he wrote, gravestone emojis interspersed, underscoring the demise of federal hiring initiatives to boost representation of groups that have faced historical barriers to equal employment access in the government workforce, such as religious minorities, veterans, people with disabilities and women.

Pulte’s social media comments echoed similar remarks he made during a Fox News interview in March, shortly after taking office as FHFA director, when he declared that “DEI is dead at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”

Altogether, Pulte described the 62 separations this week as “a standard business layoff” that impacted “the COO, Information Technology, ‘DEI,’ and other divisions.”

“We, like any business,” Pulte added, “must eliminate positions that are not core, or otherwise, to mortgages and new home sales. We have 7,000+ employees!”

The FHFA and Fannie Mae have not responded to Scotsman Guide’s requests for comment.

The Wall Street Journal first reported that up to a dozen of the 62 employees terminated Thursday worked in Fannie Mae’s ethics and internal investigations unit, tasked with investigating tip-line complaints, including allegations of internal wrongdoing.

Fannie Mae’s chief ethics officer, Suzanne Libby, was terminated last week, the Journal reported, in a leadership shake-up that also saw former General Counsel Danielle McCoy succeeded by Tom Klein, who previously served as enterprise deputy general counsel at Fannie.

Most notably, CEO Priscilla Almodovar departed the company, with no reason provided. She was replaced on an acting basis by Peter Akwaboah, the company’s chief operating officer since May 2024. Almodovar joined the company as CEO in December 2022.

Fannie and Freddie are quasi-private entities, landing in federal conservatorship during the 2008 financial crisis. Its workers are not federal employees, but those at the FHFA are.

Since President Donald Trump tapped him to lead the housing regulator, Pulte has named himself chairman of the firm’s separate boards of directors, ousting more than a dozen board members in the process.

In a Wednesday press release announcing Fannie Mae’s third-quarter earnings, Pulte maintained that the mortgage giant is “operating with greater business focus than ever.” Net income and revenues declined on an annual basis, while earnings significantly missed Wall Street analysts’ consensus estimates.

Proposed FHFA housing goals for Fannie and Freddie for 2026 to 2028 restrict mortgage liquidity to low-income borrowers to improve liquidity for “middle-class borrowers,” a shift made with the assumption that other government lending programs better service low-income and very-low-income borrowers.

Soon after his March appointment, Pulte terminated special purpose credit programs that in 2023 alone helped nearly 15,000 first-time and underserved homebuyers access homeownership, according to the National Association of Mortgage Brokers.

Pulte has also served as an adviser to Trump as the president weighs options for taking Fannie and Freddie public and potentially releasing them from federal conservatorship.

Recent guidance from Pulte’s office has further underscored the agency’s stated commitment to fraud detection, deregulation and anti-DEI policies, in compliance with Trump’s executive orders directing the same. Hundreds of employees across Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been terminated as part of these efforts, from executive leadership to rank-and-file workers.

A civil lawsuit filed in July against Fannie Mae in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by 65 former employees — each of whom is a U.S. citizen of Indian nationality, and most of whom are above the age of 50 — alleges employment discrimination in their summary April dismissals.

The employees were terminated for alleged “unethical misconduct” and “facilitating fraud” related to the alleged misuse of a matching grants program. Requests by the fired employees for evidence supporting their terminations has not been provided, according to court filings by the plaintiffs.

A separate but related lawsuit filed in August in Fairfax County Circuit Court in Viriginia names Pulte and former Fannie CEO Almodovar as defendants. In that case, employees targeted in the April firing allege Pulte and Almodovar defamed them in a press release, with an additional defamation complaint lodged against Pulte for a Fox News interview related to the terminations.