The overseer of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is waging an online battle to force out Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
Over the span of 24 hours, Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director Bill Pulte has written or shared more than a dozen posts on social media calling for Powell’s resignation and sharing the rationale for doing so, throwing his politically independent agency into a partisan battle.
“I am calling for Federal Reserve Chairman, Jay Powell, to resign,” Pulte wrote in a Thursday post on social platform X, which he pinned to the top of his profile.
In another post in response to The Hill’s reporting, Pulte said he was doing so “[b]ecause he is hurting Americans and hurting the mortgage market, which I am responsible for regulating.”
The campaign against Powell began shortly before the Fed announced Wednesday, as was widely expected, it would keep interest rates unchanged for another month. President Trump has raged against Powell and the Fed for not cutting interest rates by levels only seen during economic crises, even though the unemployment rate remains close to historic lows.
Several of Pulte’s posts featured criticism of Powell from Trump, who has spent most of his time in the White House berating and threatening his hand-picked Fed chief.
Trump and Pulte both claim the Fed is hurting the U.S. economy by keeping its baseline interest rate at a moderate level of 4.25 percent to 4.5 percent. Pulte has specifically pointed to slowness in the housing market, where average 30-year fixed mortgage rates are close to 7 percent.
“As Chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, I can tell you that Jay Powell is hurting the housing market by being Too Late to lower rates. He needs to resign, effective immediately,” Pulte wrote Wednesday.
Powell, however, is just one of 12 Fed officials who decide where to set rates. All 12 of those officials, including several Trump appointees, voted unanimously Wednesday to keep rates steady.
The Fed is also bound under federal law to use interest rates to balance unemployment and inflation — not to kickstart any one sector of the economy. The central bank typically does this by cutting interest rates to a level meant to stimulate the economy or raising them to cool it off.
Fed officials and experts refer to the central bank’s charge as its “dual mandate.” While federal law does give the Fed responsibility to maintain moderate interest rates, cutting rates only to spur the housing market could risk a spike in inflation and violate the dual mandate.
Powell said Wednesday he and his Fed colleagues prefer to keep interest rates unchanged as the economy holds sturdy in the face of major policy changes.
“It takes some time for tariffs to work their way through the chain of distribution to the end consumer,” Powell said at a press conference Wednesday. “We’re beginning to see some effects, and we do expect to see more of them over coming months.”
He added that the Fed feels comfortable with its current interest rate level as it waits to see the impact of Trump’s tariffs.
“What we’re waiting for, to reduce rates, is to understand what will happen with the tariff inflation. There’s a lot of uncertainty about that,” Powell said.
“Someone has to pay the tariffs … between the manufacturer, the exporter, the importer, the retailer, ultimately somebody putting it into a good of some kind — or just the consumer buying it.”
While Powell has faced plenty of political pressure from Trump since taking over as Fed chief in 2018, the attacks from another independent financial regulator are a stunning escalation.
Pulte is responsible for overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — two companies under federal conservatorship that package U.S. mortgages into investment products. Both companies have been under control of the federal government and housed under the FHFA since the collapse of the housing market during the 2007-08 financial crisis.
Both the Fed and FHFA are independent federal agencies charged with overseeing critically important parts of the U.S. financial system. Congress designed those agencies to be immune from the political pressures exhibited by both Trump and Pulte.
Powell, as he has for years, shot down questions Wednesday about Trump’s criticism and has insisted he will not leave the Fed before the end of his term. While Powell’s term as chair ends in 2026, he could stay on the Fed board as a governor through 2028 if he so chooses.
Updated at 4:53 p.m. EDT.
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