‘He’s a nut’: Hill Republicans sour on Trump housing official Bill Pulte

Republicans on Capitol Hill are privately expressing growing discontent with a top Trump administration housing official who has thrust himself to the center of the president’s campaign against the Federal Reserve.

Bill Pulte has parlayed a niche regulatory job — director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency — into celebrity status within President Donald Trump’s orbit by becoming one of his most vociferous social media attack dogs. But his antics are aggravating some more establishment figures around Trump — most notably Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who threatened to punch Pulte in the face at a private dinner last week in Washington.

Now, some Republican lawmakers are privately celebrating Bessent’s move to stand up to him.

“I think he’s a nut,” one House Republican said of Pulte. (Like others in this story, the lawmaker was granted anonymity to speak candidly about sensitive dynamics within the Trump administration.)

“The guy’s just a little too big for his britches,” said a second GOP lawmaker, who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, which oversees housing policy and the FHFA. “I’ve got great respect for Bessent for taking him on.”

An FHFA spokesperson said in a statement in response to a request for comment for this story that “lobbyists’ anonymous sources will not deter Director Pulte from working with the entire administration to ensure a competitive, safe, and sound mortgage market.”

The frustration among some on Capitol Hill illustrates unease over Trump’s aggressive campaign against top Fed officials. It was Pulte who first lodged mortgage fraud allegations against Fed Gov. Lisa Cook that Trump later used to fire her. And Pulte, like Trump, has relentlessly attacked Fed Chair Jerome Powell for his handling of monetary policy and the expensive renovations to the central bank’s Washington headquarters.

It also highlights the support Bessent holds from rank-and-file Hill Republicans who see him as a key stabilizing force on economic policy within the Trump administration. The Treasury secretary threatened to punch Pulte and sought to have him kicked out of a dinner last Wednesday after he learned the FHFA chief had been badmouthing him to Trump, POLITICO previously reported.

“I would have done the same,” a third House Republican lawmaker said.

Bessent also challenged some of Elon Musk’s aggressive cost-cutting efforts earlier this year through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. He earned praise from lawmakers when he privately assured them in February that DOGE was not in control of a sensitive Treasury payment system that Musk was trying to gain access to.

Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.), who chairs the House Financial Services oversight subcommittee, praised Pulte's work ethic and stressed unity on Trump's agenda, but he signaled that he favors Bessent's approach.

"I'm always in line with where the president wants to go, and I believe [Pulte] is as well," he said. "I know Secretary Bessent is, and that's where my loyalties lie, with the president and with Secretary Bessent.”

“I think he’s the adult in the room,” the first House Republican said of Bessent. “Every time these things come up, the Treasury secretary seems to be the one that’s most grounded in reality and the one that the business community, I think, can go to bed at night knowing that he understands the need to have our markets be predictable, to lead with certainty.”

The reticence of Pulte's critics to publicly criticize him reflects the outsized status he had gained among many Trump loyalists — not to mention the trust he appears to enjoy from the president himself.

Some House Republicans support Pulte and his aggressive campaign against Trump’s perceived enemies. In addition to leading the charge against Powell and Cook, Pulte has also accused Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and New York Attorney General Letitia James — both Trump foes — of mortgage fraud.

“I think he’s doing a great job,” said Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), a member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus who sits on the Financial Services panel. He declined to comment on Pulte’s campaign against the Fed, saying “you’d have to talk to him about that.”

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), another Freedom Caucus member on Financial Services, said Pulte is “doing a good job exposing some of the stuff around these mortgage [applications],” though he added that he hasn’t “really been tracking all the stuff that’s been going on” at FHFA.

The frustrations with Pulte on the Hill extend beyond Fed issues or his social media antics to his handling of the most important housing policy issue on his agenda: releasing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises that back more than half the residential mortgage market, from government control. The Trump administration is considering putting the two firms, which Pulte oversees at FHFA, up for a public offering as soon as this year.

The House Financial Services Republican said Pulte’s view of how quickly the administration should move to take public government-sponsored enterprises is “not where the committee is.”

“We want to take a much more deliberate look at Fannie and Freddie,” the lawmaker said, adding that the Financial Services panel will “make sure” any action on the GSEs “goes through Congress.”

Katherine Hapgood contributed to this report.