Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s federal regulator is operating without an inspector general after Reuters reported Monday that the agency was gearing up to fire acting Inspector General John “Joe” Allen.
Bill Pulte, the director of Fannie and Freddie’s regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has made three criminal referrals of perceived enemies of the Trump administration accusing them of mortgage fraud — actions that legal experts say only the inspector general is authorized to take.
All three — New York Attorney General Letitia James, Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff and Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook — have denied the allegations and say they are victims of political retribution. Only James has been charged — she entered a not guilty plea on Oct. 24 — but the Trump administration is attempting to remove Cook from the Fed, citing Pulte’s allegations.
California Democratic Rep. Dave Min, a former SEC prosecutor who serves on the House Oversight Committee, asked Allen in September to open an investigation into whether Pulte violated any laws “by misappropriating and misusing non-public mortgage data” in sending the criminal referrals to the Department of Justice.
Pulte, who appointed himself the chair of Fannie and Freddie’s boards of directors in March, has denied allegations that he’s weaponized the mortgage giants for political purposes, saying that FHFA will pursue evidence of mortgage fraud regardless of borrowers’ political party or status.
The FHFA has not responded to Inman’s requests for comment on whether Allen was fired, or under what authority Pulte issued criminal referrals of James, Schiff and Cook to the Department of Justice.
“The FHFA-OIG Inspector General position is currently vacant,” the office’s website said Wednesday.
Inspectors general “are one of the central watchdogs of the federal government, identifying and stopping waste, fraud and abuse and saving taxpayers tens of billions of dollars every year,” according to the nonpartisan better government group Partnership for Public Service.
The group says the Trump administration “broke historic norms” in January by firing 17 inspectors general on Jan. 25, including HUD Inspector General Rae Oliver Davis.
Pulte’s criminal referrals of James, Schiff and Cook bypassed the FHFA OIG, which typically makes such requests to the Justice Department, Reuters reported on Oct. 7, citing seven anonymous sources.
In a Nov. 1 blog post in the Yale Journal on Regulation, former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau attorney Dominic Powell questioned Pulte’s legal authority to make criminal referrals.
As Fannie and Freddie’s federal regulator, the FHFA “has no generalized crime-fighting or anti-fraud authority,” Powell wrote. “It does not even have an express authority to make criminal referrals besides those granted to the FHFA’s Inspector General under the Inspector General Act of 1978.”
The FHFA did not respond to requests from Inman for comment.
Plans for Fannie and Freddie public offering
The Trump administration — which is moving forward with plans to monetize Fannie and Freddie through a public offering that Pulte has said will probably take place in Q2 2026 — fired a dozen officials in Fannie Mae’s ethics and internal investigations on Oct. 30, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The firings came on the heels of the dismissal of Fannie Mae Chief Ethics Officer Suzanne Libby and the resignation of General Counsel Danielle McCoy. Pulte has also removed Fannie Mae CEO Priscilla Almodovar and Freddie Mac CEO Diana Reid — both companies are now run by acting CEOs.
A coalition of housing, consumer and civil rights organizations this week warned that the Trump administration’s plans to scale back lending to low- and moderate-income families will give the mortgage giants “free rein to abandon these borrowers in pursuit of purchasing the most profitable loans” to investors and second-home buyers.
After firing 14 members of Fannie and Freddie’s boards and naming himself chair of both companies in March, Pulte replaced those board members with allies.
New additions to Fannie and Freddie’s boards in March included Mike Stucky, a former Pulte Group division president; Tri Pointe Homes Inc. executive Brandon Hamara; and Ralph “Cody” Kittle, a partner at private equity firm RenWave Kore.
In April, Pulte appointed banker and investor Omeed Malik — dubbed “MAGA world’s premier financier” by New York Magazine — to Fannie’s board.
Barry Habib, founder and CEO of mortgage software platform MBS Highway, was appointed to the board on July 21.
Senate Banking Committee ranking member Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats have questioned the legality of Pulte’s purge of Fannie and Freddie’s boards.
“Director Pulte has some answering to do – what happened to the watchdog overseeing his agency?” Warren said in a statement Monday of Allen’s apparent dismissal. “What does Pulte have to hide as he continues to use his role to investigate President Trump’s perceived political enemies while failing to lower housing costs for the American people?”
Pulte and Warren have been at odds since his confirmation hearing, when Warren requested copies of 25,000 posts she claimed he had deleted from X.
Pulte, who has 3 million followers on X, continues to be active there.
On Oct. 26, he responded to a news article in which Democrats criticized his management of FHFA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by posting on X that, “Elizabeth Warren is faking an understanding of mortgage finance just like she faked her Native American heritage.”
Pulte also played a leading role in the Trump administration’s campaign to pressure Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to resign, accusing him of lying to Congress about a $2.5 billion renovation of the central bank’s Washington, D.C. office complex. Powell denied Pulte’s allegations, which have disappeared from the headlines now that Trump is resigned to letting him complete his term as Fed chair, which ends in May.
In July, Pulte posted a meme of Warren dressed as a Native American and Powell floating on a raft in a fountain in front of the Federal Reserve building with a cocktail in his hand — an allusion to the controversy over whether Warren has Native American ancestry (Trump himself often refers to Warren as “Pocahontas“).
— Pulte (@pulte) July 22, 2025
“I think he’s a nut,” one Republican House representative told Politico in August for an article in which several unnamed lawmakers expressed “growing discontent” with Pulte’s leadership of FHFA.
One lawmaker who spoke to Politico on the record, Florida Republican Rep. Byron Donalds, said Pulte has been “doing a good job exposing some of the stuff” around mortgage applications, but hasn’t “really been tracking all the stuff that’s been going on” at FHFA.
The mortgage lending industry was taken by surprise in July when Pulte announced on social media that Fannie and Freddie would allow lenders to use a new credit scoring algorithm, VantageScore 4.0, “effective today.”
The Biden administration had been working for several years to allow lenders selling loans to Fannie and Freddie to start using both VantageScore 4.0 and FICO Score 10 T scoring models this year, but the FHFA halted that process in January.
The new algorithms are intended to be more inclusive than the Classic FICO scoring model that’s been in use for nearly three decades. But adopting new credit score algorithms requires Fannie and Freddie to update their selling guides — massive documents that spell out the detailed procedures lenders must follow if they want to do business with the mortgage giants.
Today, nearly 4 months after Pulte’s announcement, Fannie and Freddie continue to require that lenders use the Classic FICO algorithm.
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