(DCNF)—Mortgage company Fannie Mae is bringing workers back to their Washington, D.C., Reston, Va. and Plano, Texas offices Monday in an attempt to avoid Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) director Bill Pulte’s executive cuts following layoffs at its sister company, Freddie Mac.
Pulte, nominated by President Donald Trump to lead the FHFA and confirmed by the Senate on March 13, wasted no time laying off executives at the mortgage associations the FHFA oversees. Pulte fired Freddie Mac’s head of human resources Dionne Wallace Oakley, Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategy and External Affairs Craig Phillips and the chief operating officer on Thursday while also replacing CEO Diana Reid with interim CEO Mike Hutchins, according to a Semafor report.
Freddie Mac workers were reportedly told to return to offices May 1, but following the executive cuts at the corporation, one Fannie Mae employee told Semafor, “I think the hope is if we appease [Pulte] with this then he won’t look to ‘DOGE’ us as much.”
Soon after entering office, Trump established the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which he tasked with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer funds within the federal government. The initiative has thus far led to thousands of employees being placed on leave, the reevaluation of federal contracts, foreign aid, federally-funded research and more. Several agencies have had their workforce and authority gutted by the administration.
Despite Fannie Mae’s employee count reaching 7,700, there are only 5,300 available office seats for employees when they return to in-person work, according to a Semafor report. It’s unclear if staff cuts will be made following the return to offices.
Fannie Mae did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
The same day Pulte fired Freddie Mac executives, he also placed FHFA Chief Operating Officer Gina Cross and Human Resources Director Monica Matthews on administrative leave, according to Politico. Moreover, over a dozen employees have been placed on administrative leave at the agency, The Wall Street Journal reported.
https://twitter.com/pulte/status/1901400362944282838
Pulte also appointed himself to chair of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s boards after firing 14 members earlier this week, Politico reported. The move comes as the administration is reportedly weighing an executive order on housing that would direct departments to look into privatization options for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to an official who spoke with the WSJ. The step to evaluate different methods for privatization is intended to protect borrowers, as privatization risks investors demanding higher premiums which would increase borrowers’ mortgage rates. The administration sees the reprivatization of the corporations as a potential strategy to reduce the country’s deficit and return funds to taxpayers.
The move to consider reprivatization, however, has received some opposition from Democratic lawmakers. The Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner was recently sent a letter signed by 11 Democratic Senators raising concerns regarding his plan to re-privatize the two firms, stating that if the process were “mismanaged” it could make mortgages more expensive for Americans.
“Changes to the ownership of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be a monumental undertaking that would affect our entire housing system and touch the lives of homeowners and renters across the country,” the Senators wrote. “If mismanaged, ending the conservatorships and Treasury’s role with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could make mortgages more expensive, cut off access to mortgage credit, destroy many of the important reforms made over the past 16 years, and compromise our entire housing market and the broader U.S. economy.”
Turner previously said he would work alongside the Treasury Department and Congress to privatize the mortgage-finance firms in a February interview with the Wall Street Journal. “There are partners that will be at the table and obviously we’ll be one of them,” said Turner, a former NFL player and Texas lawmaker. “When you’re a quarterback, you’ve got to work with the entire huddle.”
Although Turner hasn’t expanded much on the origin of his desire to free Fannie and Freddie from their government hold, it’s clear the process will take significant collaboration between the Treasury Department, Congress and FHFA.
Freddie and Fannie were previously privately owned but came under government conservatorship during the 2008 financial crisis after the U.S. Treasury Department got warrants to purchase roughly 80% of the corporation’s common shares. Now, the two mortgage giants stand behind about half of the U.S. residential mortgage market.
Freddie Mac and the FHFA did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
