Monday · March 17, 2025

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

reported Not yet re-checked Importance 9/10 ~8 min read 8 sources 4 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 sit at the center of what NPR calls the $13 trillion U.S. housing finance system, 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 Reuters called “unprecedented” (Dec. 19, 2025), which it reported the FHFA inspector general reviewed for conflict of interest, and which no prior FHFA Director is documented to have 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 chief technology officer at Leidos
  • 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 — most recently chief information officer at Rivian Automotive
  • Diane Nordin — former Wellington Management partner
  • Chetlur “Chet” Ragavan — former executive vice president and chief risk officer at Voya Financial
  • Michael Seelig — former senior executive at PricewaterhouseCoopers

Freddie Mac (6 removed)

  • Kevin Chavers — former BlackRock executive who served as president of Ginnie Mae during the Clinton administration
  • Lance Drummond — retired executive vice president at TD Canada Trust
  • Luke Hayden — consultant who previously held executive posts at BlackRock and PHH Mortgage
  • Allan Merrill — CEO of Beazer Homes USA
  • Jane Prokop — Mastercard EVP for small and medium enterprises
  • Roy Swan — head of mission investments at the Ford Foundation

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) 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 — new Fannie Mae director (March 17, 2025), a former operating partner at Pulte Capital Partners and former division president at Pulte Homes (National Mortgage News); named Vice Chair on April 10, 2025 (Fannie Mae Q1 2025 10-Q)
  • 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 has three members: Pulte (Chair), Malik and Stucky (per Fannie Mae’s Board Committees page, revised April 24, 2026; until then it listed only Pulte and Malik). This placed director-recruitment authority in a small group that included Malik, 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: in August 2025 the Wall Street Journal reported the administration was weighing a sale of 5% to 15% of the companies’ stock (Bloomberg, Aug. 8, 2025, citing WSJ)
  • Valuation estimate: about $500 billion or more combined (WSJ, via Bloomberg)
  • Equity raise: approximately $30 billion; Treasury Secretary Bessent said a 3% to 6% stake would bring in at least about $30 billion (NPR, Feb. 3, 2026)
  • White House meetings: Bank of America’s and Citigroup’s leadership met Trump in the Oval Office in August 2025 as banks competed to underwrite the offering, and JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs were also seeking the business (Fox Business, Aug. 15, 2025)
  • Capital shortfall backdrop: as of March 31, 2025, Fannie Mae reported a $140 billion shortfall against its minimum risk-based capital requirement under the Enterprise Regulatory Capital Framework, excluding buffers (Fannie Mae Q1 2025 10-Q); the Freddie Mac figure was not verified

NPR’s February 3, 2026 report (“Privatizing Fannie Mae is risky. Would it be a win for taxpayers or Trump’s donors?”) said critics warn that unwinding the conservatorship could rattle financial markets and drive up mortgage rates, “while potentially generating billions of dollars for key Trump supporters,” and named billionaire holders of old Fannie and Freddie stock, including Bill Ackman, who could get “a massive windfall” depending on how the exit is structured. 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.

Fannie Mae’s Q1 2025 10-Q reported that the board had not yet considered Malik’s independence or committee assignments.

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”). The 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/