New Intelligence Role Puts Bill Pulte’s Housing Agenda in Doubt

Bill Pulte, President Trump’s top housing official, has voiced grand ambitions for jump-starting the housing market by lowering interest rates, boosting home construction and reshaping the federally controlled mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

With his appointment on Tuesday as the acting director of national intelligence, Mr. Pulte will now also vet national security threats.

Already, Mr. Pulte’s tenure as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency was marked by a lot of talk and theatrics but few tangible results. With his new unusual dual role, housing advocates said they expected his housing agenda to slow even more.

“It suggests that, for the time being anyway, any efforts that require a heavy lift from F.H.F.A. will have to wait,” said Jim Parrott, a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute and an adviser on housing finance issues.

Mr. Pulte, 38, is a grandson of the founder of PulteGroup, one of the nation’s largest home-building companies, and served on its board for about four years before his fellow members pushed him out. But he has had little day-to-day experience in the housing world outside of owning several small mobile home parks in Florida and a number of single-family rental homes.

At the housing agency, Mr. Pulte has shaken up the staff, firing people in large groups. Teams focusing on fair-lending enforcement and climate risk were cut or merged with others.