Until he became the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and a warrior in President Trump’s fight with the Federal Reserve, Bill Pulte was mostly known for posting on X. Under the handle @pulte, the businessman frequently sent groceries and gas money to people in need.
In his governmental role, which he assumed in March, Pulte has continued to use X as a megaphone. Over the last six months, he has posted at least 13 official orders on his personal account — and they don’t appear to be posted publicly anywhere else.
The practice is unusual for the head of an agency that regulates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two housing-finance companies under federal conservatorship central to the $21 trillion residential mortgage market.
Under previous leaders, the FHFA hasn’t followed a single standard for publishing orders. Some have appeared in the Federal Register or on the agency’s website, while others were only circulated by email.
Former FHFA employees said they couldn’t recall learning about orders on Twitter or social media before.
Former FHFA officials and a legal expert said publishing directives — including one instructing the companies to consider cryptocurrency assets in mortgage underwriting — on a personal social media account raised concerns about legality and how those inside and outside the industry are supposed to track changes that could affect lenders, investors, and tenants.
The orders, including two that roll back climate change and tenant protection requirements, don’t appear to have been posted on any government websites. Some of the posts were previously reported by Inman, a housing industry publication.
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The FHFA is not required to post all of its orders and policy directives online. Pulte said in an interview posted April 30 that he had already signed 80 orders. In the past, the agency has often drafted orders collaboratively and circulated them by email to relevant parties when they were finalized, said Victoria Nahrwold, a former senior official at the FHFA who retired in June.
Pulte’s most recent post, from June, called on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to consider the value of a homebuyer’s cryptocurrency when calculating their assets.
Pulte posted about what he described as an “official government account” back in May. He hasn’t yet posted from it.
Janell Byrd-Chichester, the FHFA’s chief of staff from 2014 to 2019, called Pulte’s social-media use “very bizarre” and out of step with past practice.
“It’s so far off the radar about what activity is contemplated by government officials,” said Byrd-Chichester, who is now the general counsel of the National Fair Housing Alliance.
Nahrwold said that while she worked at FHFA, she followed Pulte on X to learn about what was going on at the FHFA and the entities it regulated. “If you didn’t see it on social media, you wouldn’t know,” she said. At least some orders posted on X were also circulated by email, she said.
“This is very abnormal,” said David Reiss, a law professor at Cornell University who focuses on housing policy and real-estate finance. “I don’t know what a court would do if someone sued based on an order that he only posted on X.” He added by email that impacted parties might argue that carrying out official acts by an X post doesn’t comply with the Administrative Procedure Act.
The FHFA did not respond to questions about Pulte’s posts. Pulte didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Despite the relative obscurity of the FHFA — which was created by Congress in 2008 to be a stronger regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac amid a wave of mortgage defaults — Pulte catapulted to prominence in recent weeks after accusing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook of mortgage fraud.
The American Banker reported that his posts about Cook may violate the Privacy Act. Pulte said in a Bloomberg TV appearance that he only posted public information.
Pulte also owns a stake in X valued at between $1 million and $5 million, according to an official financial disclosure.
Though he deleted nearly all of his X posts after Trump was elected president in 2024, he eventually resumed posting at a rapid pace. He posted or reposted 33 times on September 5, for example, mostly to assail the president’s political opponents, including Cook.
The orders that Pulte posted on X are hardly the biggest thing on FHFA’s plate; the National Association of Realtors described some of them in a blog post as not creating any “notable cost savings.” More important to observers of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and their regulator are the Trump administration’s plans to sell part of the US Treasury’s massive stake in the mortgage securitization companies.
The sale, if it goes through, could generate billions of dollars for the federal government. It could also derail efforts by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to grow a capital cushion that could be needed to avoid a bailout in a future major housing downturn.
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