(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) On Monday, Senate Republicans accused President Joe Biden’s Federal Housing Finance Agency of attempting to “social-engineer the U.S. housing market” to punish those with good credit and subsidize those with poor credit, Fox News reported.
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., joined several other GOP Senators, penning a letter to FHFA Director Sandra Thompson asking for details regarding the policy decision.
According to Marshall and his colleagues, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, federally-sponsored banking entities, will begin taking on high-risk mortgages at the expense of lower-risk mortgages, cutting against basic financial sense.
“This announcement, scheduled to take effect May 1, 2023, will invert the common-sense risk financing structure at the GSEs in an effort to decrease mortgage rates for riskier individuals with low credit scores and forcibly raise rates for those with higher scores,” they wrote.
They also called the policy “shortsighted and counterproductive” suggesting that it “demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the necessity of accurately tailoring housing finance products to credit risk and establishes a perverse incentive that punishes hardworking Americans for their fiscal prudence.”
The senators further claimed that the Biden administration was exploiting the housing market to “pander to targeted demographics” and thereby secure political support from those groups.
In a separate interview, Marshall noted that Biden and Democrats more generally seem to have no idea of the struggles of the average American.
“Joe Biden couldn’t be more out of touch with the hardships Americans are facing due to his failed economic agenda, skyrocketing interest rates, and record high Bidenflation,” he said.
The president, he added, is now “penalizing responsible Americans with good credit scores” in an attempt to redistribute wealth to favored racial or economic classes.
“This is illogical,” he concluded. “The Biden administration must answer for why they are punishing Americans who have diligently met their financial obligations and earned higher credit scores.”