Donald Trump said Wednesday that he is giving “very serious consideration” to a plan that would upend the the U.S. mortgage market.
“I am giving very serious consideration to bringing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac public,” the president wrote in a Truth Social post on Wednesday.
He said he would be speaking to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and the Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, William Pulte, among others, “and will be making a decision in the near future.”
“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are doing very well, throwing off a lot of CASH, and the time would seem to be right. Stay tuned!” he teased.
The two government-sponsored enterprises are juggernauts in the U.S. housing finance system, together backing around 70% of the country’s mortgage market.
Trump’s first administration expressed interest in privatizing Fannie and Freddie, but it never came to fruition.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-chartered financial institutions with private shareholders. They were created by Congress to make home ownership more accessible by improving the flow of money through the mortgage market.
After the 2008 housing market collapse led to catastrophic losses for the then-private companies, the government stepped in, placing Fannie and Freddie into a conservatorship.
Economists warn that changing this structure could hike up already-high mortgage rates, amplifying cost-of-living pressures and putting home ownership even further out of reach for many Americans.
“The law says they are eventually to be privatized,” Susan Wachter, professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told CNN in December. “But the stakes are very, very high as to how this is carried out.”
Proponents of privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac include hedge fund managers and wealthy investors, who argue the lenders are long overdue for release from government control.
Bessent told Bloomberg in February that any such action would depend on its implications for mortgage rates.
“The priority for a Fannie and Freddie release, the most important metric that I’m looking at, is any study or hint that mortgage rates would go up,” Bessent said.
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