Monday · March 17, 2025

Pulte Purges 14 Directors from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Boards, Installs Himself as Chairman of Both GSEs

confirmed Importance 9/10 ~7 min read 8 sources 23 actors

Pulte Purges Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Boards, Installs Himself as Chairman of Both GSEs

On March 17-18, 2025 — within 72 hours of being sworn in as the 5th Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency on March 14 — Bill Pulte removed 14 directors from the Boards of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored enterprises that together backstop approximately $7 trillion of U.S. residential mortgages under federal conservatorship. Pulte then appointed himself Chairman of both boards while continuing to serve as the federal regulator exercising conservatorship authority over the same entities — a dual-hat arrangement no prior FHFA Director has attempted since the agency was created by the 2008 Housing and Economic Recovery Act (HERA).

The purge created 8 vacancies at Fannie Mae and 6 vacancies at Freddie Mac, which Pulte subsequently filled with a mix of FHFA officials, Trump-aligned political appointees, and (on April 14, 2025) Omeed Malik, the founder of 1789 Capital and business partner of Donald Trump Jr. See 2025-04-14–malik-appointed-fannie-mae-board.

The 14 Ousted Directors

Per the Washington Post (March 18, 2025), National Mortgage News, and Inman coverage, the full list of removed directors:

Fannie Mae (8 removed)

  • Amy Alving — former Leidos CTO; SAIC senior vice president
  • Christopher Brummer — Georgetown Law professor of financial regulation and securities law; African-American finance-policy scholar
  • Michael Heid — former President of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage; ex-HSBC Americas executive
  • Simon Johnson — MIT Sloan economist; former IMF Chief Economist; 2024 Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences
  • Diane Lye — former Rearc CEO; ex-Amazon Web Services executive
  • Diane Nordin — former Wellington Management partner
  • Chetlur “Chet” Ragavan — former Promontory Financial Group partner; ex-BlackRock managing director
  • Michael Seelig — former Merrill Lynch / Banc of America Securities executive

Freddie Mac (6 removed)

  • Kevin Chavers — former BlackRock managing director; ex-Morgan Stanley Mortgage Capital managing director
  • Lance Drummond — former TD Bank Group EVP and COO
  • Luke Hayden — former Morgan Stanley managing director of mortgage finance
  • Allan Merrill — CEO of Beazer Homes USA
  • Jane Prokop — Mastercard EVP for small and medium enterprises
  • Roy Swan — Ford Foundation Head of Mission Investments; former Morgan Stanley managing director

The ousted cohort included an MIT-affiliated Nobel laureate (Johnson), a Georgetown securities-regulation scholar (Brummer), and senior alumni of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Promontory, Wellington, TD Bank, Mastercard, Beazer Homes, and the Ford Foundation — a cross-section of credentialed housing-finance, risk-management, and institutional-investment expertise.

Pulte’s Self-Installation as Chairman — Legal Question Under HERA 2008

Federal law governing the FHFA Director role prohibits the Director from holding “any office or position” at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or any affiliated entity. HERA (12 U.S.C. §§ 4511-4512) established the FHFA as an independent regulator whose fiduciary duty runs to the conservatorships of the GSEs — a posture understood across the 2008-2024 period to require structural separation between the regulator and the regulated entities’ corporate governance.

Pulte’s March 17-18 self-appointment as Chairman of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while simultaneously serving as FHFA Director is a facially novel arrangement. Under conservatorship, the FHFA Director already possesses statutory powers to direct the GSEs’ operations without holding a board seat; taking a Chairman role in addition concentrates regulator, conservator, and corporate-governance authority in a single federal official. No court had ruled on the legality of the dual-hat arrangement as of April 2026, and no congressional oversight hearing had addressed it.

HERA §§ 4513 and 4617 (conservator/receiver powers) do not explicitly bar the dual role, but were drafted on the premise that the Director exercises external regulatory authority rather than internal corporate governance. The Revolving Door Project (2025) and the Washington Post editorial board flagged the arrangement as a structural precondition for every subsequent decision made by the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac boards: without an independent board, there is no counterweight to the regulator’s policy preferences.

Replacement Appointments

Pulte installed new directors including:

Fannie Mae:

  • William J. “Bill” Pulte — Chairman
  • Clinton Jones — FHFA General Counsel (dual-seated across both GSEs)
  • Christopher Stanley — SpaceX and X cybersecurity engineer; Musk-aligned technologist (resigned approximately one day after appointment per later reporting)
  • Michael Stucky — Vice Chair (retained from prior board, elevated)
  • Additional seats filled in subsequent weeks (Malik on April 14, 2025)

Freddie Mac:

  • William J. “Bill” Pulte — Chairman
  • Brandon Hamara
  • Clinton Jones (dual-seated)
  • Ralph “Cody” Kittle
  • Additional appointments through 2025

The Fannie Mae Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee was ultimately reduced to a two-member body: Pulte as Chair and Malik as the sole other member (per Fannie Mae’s current corporate-governance page). This placed director-recruitment authority in a pair with documented pre-existing financial overlap via the Pulte Family Office’s January 2025 equity position in GrabAGun, a 1789 Capital portfolio company.

Market and Transactional Context

The purge and self-chairmanship occurred in the run-up to a publicly-floated Fannie/Freddie IPO under continued conservatorship:

  • Planned offering: 5-15% of combined Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac equity via public stock sale
  • Valuation estimate: $500 billion to $700 billion combined
  • Equity raise: approximately $30 billion
  • White House meeting: Trump personally convened JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, and Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan at the White House to discuss IPO structure (HousingWire, August 2025)
  • Capital shortfall backdrop: Fannie Mae reported a $33 billion Enterprise Regulatory Capital Framework (ERCF) capital gap in Q1 2025; Freddie Mac reported $162 billion

NPR’s February 3, 2026 investigation (“Privatizing Fannie Mae is risky. Would it be a win for taxpayers or Trump’s donors?”) concluded the IPO “could generate billions of dollars for key Trump supporters.” Between the March 17-18 board purge and any offering, the self-chairmanship ensured that pre-IPO valuation models, underwriter-selection materials, and allocation plans would flow through a governance structure hand-picked by the federal regulator rather than an independent board.

Why This Matters — Structural Preconditioner

The March 17-18 purge is the structural preconditioner for every subsequent Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac governance event in 2025-2026:

  1. Malik appointment (April 14, 2025). One of the 8 Fannie Mae vacancies created March 17-18 was filled by Don Jr.’s business partner. Without the purge, there was no seat to fill. See 2025-04-14–malik-appointed-fannie-mae-board.

  2. Crypto-as-mortgage-asset directive (June 25, 2025). Pulte, as both FHFA Director and Chair of both GSE boards, ordered Fannie and Freddie to develop proposals counting cryptocurrency as an asset for mortgage qualification — a policy move with no independent board resistance available.

  3. Mortgage-fraud referral campaign (August 2025-December 2025). Pulte’s access to GSE loan databases, facilitated by his Chairman role, enabled the criminal referrals against Fed Governor Lisa Cook, NY AG Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff, and Rep. Eric Swalwell. See 2025-08-15–pulte-weaponizes-mortgage-data-against-fed-governor and 2025-08-20–pulte-mortgage-fraud-campaign-against-democrats.

  4. Planned GSE IPO. An independent Board of Directors, with Nobel-laureate economists and credentialed risk-management professionals, would have constituted a structural check on the timing, structure, and allocation of any public offering. The March 17-18 purge removed that check.

  5. GAO investigation (December 4, 2025). The Government Accountability Office opened a formal investigation into Pulte’s weaponized criminal referrals, responding to a Senate Democrats’ letter. See 2025-12-04–gao-investigates-pulte-weaponized-criminal-referrals. The investigation’s existence is downstream of the governance arrangement established March 17-18.

The Fannie Mae 10-Q filings through 2025 confirm that as of each filing, the Board’s reconstitution was ongoing and that committee assignments and independence determinations for new directors had not been finalized — meaning Pulte effectively operated as the sole decision-making authority over two entities holding ~$7 trillion of U.S. mortgage exposure during the reconstitution window.

Sourcing and Gaps

The 14 director names are confirmed via the Washington Post’s March 18, 2025 report (“Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac boards overhauled by Pulte FHFA”), National Mortgage News’ contemporaneous coverage (“New FHFA chief shakes up Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac’s boards”), and Inman’s March 18 summary (“Pulte is New Chair Of Fannie And Freddie After Purge Of 14 Board Members”). Worker V’s pulte-bill actor profile aggregates these names from the same sources.

Open documentation gaps (not blocking this entry):

  • Exact timing of the removal notices to each director (March 17 letter? March 18 board announcement? Each director’s effective date individually?) — WaPo and NMN coverage treats the cohort as a two-day event; per-director notification timing is not public.
  • Any director resignation vs. removal distinction — public reporting uses “removed” and “ousted” uniformly, but the formal mechanism (FHFA directive to the conservatorship board, voluntary resignation under pressure, or statutory removal) is not individually specified for each of the 14 names.
  • Compensation and severance treatment — whether ousted directors received their scheduled 2025 director-fee payments or were paid severance is not public.
  • Internal FHFA directive authorizing the removals — not published; would clarify the legal theory under which Pulte acted.

Sources & Citations

[1] Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac boards overhauled by Pulte FHFA · Mar 18, 2025 Tier 1
[2] New FHFA chief shakes up Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac's boards · 2025-03 Tier 2
[3] Pulte is New Chair Of Fannie And Freddie After Purge Of 14 Board Members · Mar 18, 2025 Tier 2
[4] Updated list of Bill Pulte's actions that impact FHFA, GSEs · 2025 Tier 2
[5] William J. Pulte — FHFA Leadership Page · Mar 14, 2025 Tier 1
[6] Senate confirms Bill Pulte as FHFA director · Mar 13, 2025 Tier 2
[7] Fannie Mae Appoints Omeed Malik to the Board of Directors, Effective April 14, 2025 · Apr 14, 2025 Tier 1
[8] Privatizing Fannie Mae is risky. Would it be a win for taxpayers or Trump's donors? · Feb 3, 2026 Tier 1
Tiers Tier 1 court records & gov docs · Tier 2 established outlets · Tier 3 regional & specialty press · Tier 4 opinion or single-source. Methodology →
Cite this entry
The Cascade Ledger. “Pulte Purges 14 Directors from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Boards, Installs Himself as Chairman of Both GSEs.” The Capture Cascade Timeline, March 17, 2025. https://capturecascade.org/event/2025-03-17--pulte-purges-fannie-freddie-boards-installs-self-chairman/