Yet Another Purge in Washington

Before becoming a regular travel companion of President Trump’s, the nation’s top housing-finance official and the nation’s top intelligence official for one summer, Bill Pulte, was a meme-stock celebrity who was once honored in a livestream with a gag dinosaur trophy inscribed with the words Bill Pulte Fucks on the front and only the young on the back.

“That looks pretty badass,” he said upon accepting the bizarro honor.

The 38-year-old heir to a developer dynasty has brought the same raw attitude to his time as a government servant.

In his first months at the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, he oversaw hundreds of firings at the agency and at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and replaced both organizations’ chief executives.

He boasted of overseeing five rounds of layoffs during his six-week stint as acting director of national intelligence that eliminated the staff by about 30 percent at an agency that Trump has long viewed as redundant and adversarial.

Then, this week, just days after returning to his old job at FHFA, he fired about a dozen more senior executives at Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored company that guarantees $4.1 trillion in U.S. mortgages, two people familiar with the firings told me. [ Read: Trump has a Bill Pulte problem ] The bio pages of some of the company’s top executives—Senior Vice President of Capital Markets Devang Doshi, Multifamily Chief Financial Officer Brian Hensen, to name two—were redirecting to 404-error pages yesterday, after announcements were made on Wednesday that they would lose their jobs, according to people involved.

The firings were first reported by The Wall Street Journal .

Doshi, Hensen, and others who were dismissed did not respond to requests for comment.

One person involved in the effort told me that the firings had been carried out because of an evolution in the business at Fannie and not for any ideological reason.

“Mostly it was operational.

We just don’t need them anymore, especially in the D.C. office,” this person told me, after requesting anonymity to describe personnel matters.

“With the advent of AI and stuff, we have gotten a lot of savings.” Spokespeople for Fannie Mae and FHFA did not respond to requests for comment.

But the lasting impact of the firings may have more to do with Pulte’s positioning of himself as a go-to disrupter in Trump’s senior team.

It’s a position that has caused tensions with other White House officials, who see Pulte as a distracting and problematic troublemaker who appeals to Trump’s most reckless instincts.