The Dog That Didn't Bark: What FHFA's Rulemaking Docket Says About the Fannie/Freddie Endgame

If you're new here: I'm Glen Bradford. I'm long Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac junior preferred shares — most of my net worth — and I've written the full Fanniegate thesis for years. This is analysis and opinion, not investment advice. I hold what I write about.

If you're back: this pairs with my two posts from the last day — the construction-loan drumbeat (posture, not mechanism) and CapWealth's affordability whitepaper (the GSE resolution as an affordability lever). This one goes to the paper trail — FHFA's own rulemaking docket — and shows the same story told in Federal Register citations.

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Read the docket, not the headlines

Sherlock Holmes solved one case on the dog that didn't bark. FHFA's Federal Register docket works the same way. If you scroll the agency's rulemaking list looking for the blockbuster — the rewrite of the Enterprise Regulatory Capital Framework that everyone knows is coming — you won't find it. It isn't there. Not proposed, not docketed, nothing.

What you will find is a steady, deliberate, year-long pattern of something else: FHFA under Bill Pulte pulling out Biden-era mandates and cross-subsidies, one rule at a time. Once you line them up, the sequence tells you exactly where this is going.

The deregulatory sweep, in order

• October 2, 2025 — withdrew the liquidity requirements. FHFA formally withdrew three Biden-era proposed rules, including the 2021 Enterprise Liquidity Requirements proposal, saying it "no longer intends to issue final rules." Translation: a set of constraints that would have forced the companies to hold more low-yielding liquidity — gone.
• December 23, 2025 — rolled back the housing goals. The 2026–2028 Enterprise Housing Goals final rule reset what the agency called overly restrictive Biden-era affordable-housing quotas.
• February 6, 2026 — repealed the fair-lending plans. FHFA finalized the repeal of the 2024 Fair Lending, Fair Housing, and Equitable Housing Finance Plans rule, eliminating the requirement that Fannie and Freddie build, execute, and report on equitable-housing plans. FHFA called the rule not "legally necessary" and tied the repeal to the administration's deregulation and anti-DEI priorities — explicitly citing Executive Order 14219, the government-wide deregulation order. (National Mortgage News confirms.)
• June 24, 2026 — reworked Duty to Serve. The newest one, and the most revealing. The Enterprise Duty to Serve Amendments proposed rule (RIN 2590-AB64; a technical correction followed on June 26) is pitched as letting the companies serve manufactured, rural, and affordable-preservation markets "through greater innovation and with less administrative burden." Read the agency's own framing: it is about "eliminating unduly burdensome rules and reforming programs that constrain residential development and impede housing affordability," including on chattel (personal-property) loans for manufactured housing. Comments close July 24.

Four moves, one direction: less mandate, less cross-subsidy, less administrative drag.

One caution, so you don't over-read it. If you noticed a burst of FHFA filings in the last week of June and thought there it is, they're wrapping up before the capital rule — slow down. Look at what those actually were. The Duty to Serve rule is a comment period that just opened (comments run to July 24), not one closing. The biggest-looking item, the June 25 Financial Data Transparency Act joint data-standards final rule, isn't even a GSE rule — it's a nine-agency standard (SEC, OCC, the Fed, FDIC, NCUA, CFPB, CFTC, Treasury, and FHFA) required by a 2022 statute, about data formats, that FHFA merely co-signed. And the June 30 entry is an internal HR records notice. The signal here was never a single hot week. It's the year.

Why a bull reads this as grooming, not gutting

Here's the mechanism, and it's the same one Don Layton — the former Freddie Mac CEO, no cheerleader for a rushed release — keeps pointing at. Every unfunded mandate, hidden tax, and forced cross-subsidy you pile on the GSEs lowers their return on equity and makes them harder to sell to private capital. Run the logic backward and it becomes a to-do list: if you intend to release these companies, you first strip out the obligations that depress ROE, because a cleaner income statement is what lets you raise the record capital a release requires.

That is precisely what the docket shows. FHFA isn't sitting on its hands waiting for the capital rule. It's spending 2025–26 making Fannie and Freddie more investable — the unglamorous prep work that has to happen before, not after, anyone talks valuation.

And the Duty to Serve rewrite is the through-line to everything else I've written this week. "Rules that constrain residential development and impede housing affordability" is the language of the construction-and-supply posture — a homebuilder on Fannie's board, a President telling the companies to get builders going — and it's the same lever CapWealth's affordability whitepaper named as one of the most consequential and least-discussed in the country. The affordability agenda isn't just rhetoric anymore. It's now showing up as docketed rulemaking aimed at manufactured housing — the cheapest new supply in America.

The dog that didn't bark

Now the absence. With all this activity, the one thing FHFA has not filed is a revision to the capital rule. No ERCF proposed rule. The only capital documents on the site are the fact sheets for the 2020 framework — the rule everyone agrees is too high.

A bear reads that silence as "see, nothing's happening." I read it as sequencing. You don't lead with the capital rewrite. The capital rule is downstream of the Executive Order 14393 report due around July 11 — the internal FHFA report on housing-finance-market efficiency that I've flagged as the first hard date. The realistic order of operations is: clear the mandates (happening now), receive the report (mid-July), then propose the capital rule (Q3 and beyond). The docket is running in exactly that order. The capital rule isn't missing. It's next.

Where I sit

Nothing here changes the trade. But it sharpens the picture. When people ask me why I'm confident the direction is set even though the timing isn't, this is a big part of the answer: you can watch the preparation happening in the public record, in the boring Federal Register entries nobody clicks. Mandates coming off. Affordability levers going on. Capital rule staged for after the report. That is what getting a company ready to sell looks like from the regulator's side — and it's why I stay in the junior preferred, positioned for direction, not a date.

Watch the docket. The next entry worth caring about has a capital RIN on it, and when it lands, you'll have read about the setup here first.

Focus on the positives. There are a lot of them.

Disclosure: I own Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac junior preferred shares and have been long for years. This is my opinion and analysis, not investment advice. Rulemaking dates, RINs, and characterizations are drawn from FHFA's Federal Register docket and the linked reporting; quotations of the agency's framing are from the cited proposed rule. Do your own work.

Keep reading

• The construction-loan drumbeat: confirmation, not the trigger — the posture read this docket confirms.
• CapWealth's affordability whitepaper — GSE resolution as an affordability instrument.
• It's all one move: ERCF, the senior preferred, and no mega-IPO — where the capital rule fits, and the July 11 date.
• The GSE preferred cheat sheet — the thesis, the risks, and the ticker map in about 60 seconds.
• The full Fanniegate thesis — ten-plus years, the whole case, in one place.