A key ally of Donald Trump and the man behind the administration’s pitch for 50-year mortgages says the president has now ditched the idea.
Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte told reporters that “We have other priorities.”
Trump initially shared his support for the 50-year mortgage on Truth Social in November 2025, just minutes after Pulte presented him with the idea on a poster board.
In the widely shared image, Trump stood alongside President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had popularized the 30-year mortgage, with the headline reading “Great American Presidents.”
Trump was quick to defend his idea, telling Fox News’ Laura Inghram, “It’s not even a big deal… all it means is you pay less per month, you pay it over a longer period of time. It’s not, like, a big factor.”
However, several economists and financial experts, like Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, jumped in to criticize its feasibility. “This is just kind of a financial engineering, because the amount of interest you’re going to pay over 50 years, you’ll never own the home,” O’Leary said on X.
The administration pulled focus from the proposal following the swift backlash and, since then, pivoted to other possible fixes, like a call to ban institutional buyers like BlackRock from purchasing single-family homes.
Pulte’s newest announcement comes after Trump’s end-of-year assertions that he would tackle rising housing costs in 2026. “I will announce some of the most aggressive housing reform plans in American history,” Trump said in his December address to the public.
Homeownership has become increasingly inaccessible. The National Association of Realtors reports that the average age of first-time homebuyers has risen to 40, up from 28 in the 90s. Trump told supporters that the affordability crisis is a “hoax” in a speech just a month ago, but has adjusted his rhetoric since to center the issue instead.
Trump and his goons are still identifying how to address the ballooning housing costs. Trump’s December speech placed blame on a “colossal border invasion” for driving up home prices. Whereas other Republican operatives have also proposed a plan to slash Section 8 housing budgets, which could make housing in major cities inaccessible to hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Pulte says the administration has been expanding its scope on rising housing costs.
“We are looking at everything. We presented the president with anywhere between 30 to 50 different options to improve affordability,” Pulte told CNBC.
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