Another One Bites the Dust: Biden Will Replace Trump Housing Appointee After Supreme Court Greenlight
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President Joe Biden will expel yet another Trump appointee after the Supreme Court ruled he has the authority to replace the head of a federal agency that oversees mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.
According to a senior White House official, the president plans to replace Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency Mark Calabria after the Supreme Court issued a ruling stating that he his the authority to do so. From The New York Times:
A senior White House official said that, in light of the ruling, Mr. Biden would move ahead with plans to replace Mark Calabria, who was appointed by President Donald J. Trump to oversee the agency.
Replacing Mr. Calabria would give Mr. Biden more control over the fate of the mortgage giants, which play an outsized role in the housing market and are central to many homeowners’ ability to afford homes. Fannie and Freddie do not make home loans but instead buy mortgages and package them into securities, providing a guarantee to make investors who buy those securities whole in case of default. That helps keep the cost of 30-year mortgages low.
Mr. Calabria, during his tenure, had overseen the enactment of a number of rules that were seen as critical steps toward ending the federal government’s conservatorship of Fannie and Freddie, which was imposed in 2008 at the start of the financial crisis. Mr. Calabria has favored a move toward privatizing Fannie and Freddie and ending the conservatorship. Many housing advocates and Democrats also favor ending it, but they do not necessarily want Fannie and Freddie put into private hands.
Calabria is just the latest Trump appointee to face the Biden axe, as some positions are more difficult to turn over than others. In late May, the Biden administration canned four Trump-appointed members of a federal commission, most of whom were appointed very late in the term of then-President Donald Trump in a blizzard of lame-duck patronage.
