White House officials are furious with Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, who talked the president into suggesting a 50-year mortgage plan.
The White House was blindsided by the idea, according to two people familiar with the situation granted anonymity to discuss internal thinking, and is now dealing with a furious backlash from conservative allies, business leaders and lawmakers.
On Saturday evening, Pulte arrived at President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach Golf Club with a roughly 3-by-5 posterboard in hand. A graphic of former President Franklin Roosevelt appeared below “30-year mortgage” and one of Trump below “50-year mortgage.” The headline was “Great American Presidents.”
Roughly 10 minutes later, Trump posted the image to Truth Social, according to one of the people familiar, who was with the president at the time.
Almost immediately, aides were fielding angry phone calls from those who thought the idea – which would endorse a 50 year payback period for a mortgage – was both bad politics and bad policy, a move that could raise housing costs in the long run, the person said.
“He just sold POTUS a bill of goods that wasn’t necessarily accurate,” the person said. “He said ‘FDR did it, you can do it, it’s gonna be a big thing.’ But he didn’t tell him about all the unintended consequences.”
The episode underscores the haphazard ways consequential policies are sometimes brought before the president, and how Trump’s govern-by-whim nature can backfire.
“Anything that goes before POTUS needs to be vetted,” said the person present for Pulte’s poster presentation. “And a lot of times with Pulte they’re not. He just goes straight up to POTUS.”
One of the two people familiar said there is more fallout from this idea than almost any other policy proposal of the second term, including from the MAGA base.
Trump on Monday downplayed the proposal and said it was not “a big deal.”
“All it means is you pay less per month,” Trump said on a Fox News show hosted by Lara Ingraham. “Pay it over a longer period of time. It’s not like a big factor. It might help a little bit.”
Nevertheless, conservative influencers, including Laura Loomer, Mike Cernovich, Christopher Rufo, Sean Davis of the Federalist, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) blasted the idea on social media.
“The thing that became clear from this latest episode — if it wasn’t already clear — is that Bill Pulte doesn’t know the first fucking thing about how the mortgage markets operate,” one of the two people said. “After publicly humiliating the president with his moronic 50 year mortgage plan it’s safe to assume that his days are numbered.”
A slew of experts also panned the idea.
“It would lead to buyers building equity in their homes more slowly. At the beginning of the mortgage, more of those payments tend to be interest,” Gennadiy Goldberg, head of US rates strategy at TD Securities. “This is more of a stopgap bandaid to address affordability.”
On Monday, Pulte seemed to acknowledge the criticism, posting that a 50 year mortgage is just one piece of “a WIDE arsenal of solutions” that the Trump administration is developing. He also mentioned other ideas including portable mortgages, which can transfer to a new property, and assumable mortgages, which can be transferred to a property’s new buyer.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said Trump is “committed to making it easier and more affordable to achieve the American Dream of homeownership by eliminating unnecessary red tape, increasing supply, and lowering costs.”
“The White House and the entire Trump administration are appreciative of Mr. Pulte’s efforts, and everyone is working together to implement the President’s policies,” Ingle said.
An FHFA spokesperson told POLITICO that the inflation under former President Joe Biden destroyed the housing market. “As a result, we are studying a myriad of options to combat the damage it’s done,” the spokesperson said.
This is not the first time Pulte’s policy proposals have caused headaches. He was also behind the idea Trump floated earlier this year to take Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac public, which also resulted in significant pushback from industry.
It was also Pulte who first lodged mortgage fraud allegations against Fed Gov. Lisa Cook that Trump later used to fire her. Cook’s firing has been blocked in the courts and the case is pending before the Supreme Court.
POLITICO has also recently reported that Republicans in Congress are also growing increasingly frustrated with him.
Now, senior administration officials are increasingly getting fed up with Pulte’s approach. Yet Pulte remains close with the President and has direct access that aides have not been able to control.
“Trump isn’t just Pulte’s biggest ally in the admin, he is perhaps his only friend,” said one person familiar with their dynamic. “During Trump 2.0, the last time anything got as much pushback as this was over the ‘Epstein Files.’ MAGA is furious.”
In theory, 50-year mortgages would mean lower monthly payments for borrowers, but it also comes at a cost to homebuyers, who would build equity much more slowly.
In a statement warning that 50-year mortgages would “not address the true cause of today’s affordability challenges,” the National Association of Realtor’s chief economist Lawrence Yun said that homeowners could still gain some equity “as long as these mortgages are soundly underwritten.”
