Bill Pulte for director of national intelligence? Really? President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social Tuesday that he is appointing William J. Pulte to be acting director of national intelligence, following the resignation of Tulsi Gabbard. Pulte is director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, in which capacity Pulte has also appointed himself chairman of the Federal National Mortgage Association (a.k.a. Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (a.k.a. Freddie Mac)—two government-sponsored (and, since 2008, government-controlled) enterprises assigned the task of keeping houses affordable. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pursue this goal by buying and securitizing mortgages. Trump said Pulte will retain these three posts while he serves as director of national intelligence.Why anybody would pile more responsibilities onto the guy who’s supposed to keep housing affordable when the country is in the midst of a housing-affordability crisis is a question we’ll leave to another day. (The short answer is that Trump doesn’t give a damn about the affordability crisis, and indeed exasperates his handlers by frequently mocking the very word “affordability.”) The question critics are racing to ask right now is why Trump would give the post to someone with no experience. “He knows absolutely nothing about intelligence,” said Virginia Senator Mark Warner. “He has no background at all.”That isn’t quite right. Pulte has quite a lot of experience using his position at FHFA to gather intelligence on the mortgages held by Trump’s enemies. That is perhaps what Trump meant in his Truth Social post when he said Pulte had “deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America.” It was Pulte who persuaded Trump to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook on the grounds that she engaged in “deceitful and potentially criminal conduct” for claiming two primary residences on a mortgage application. The firing was an attempt to intimidate Fed Chair Jerome Powell into lowering interest rates. Pulte also got the Justice department to investigate, for the same alleged crime, Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, who as a House member was lead manager in Trump’s first impeachment, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who won a $464 million civil fraud suit against Trump.These escapades may have given Pulte “deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America,” but nobody would accuse Pulte, even on his own corrupt terms, of managing them particularly well. Further investigation established that criminal charges against Cook, Schiff, and James would never stick. Meanwhile, it came out that four members of Trump’s own second-term Cabinet—former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer; Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy; Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin; and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—similarly claimed two primary residences on their mortgage applications, along with Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles and—rimshot, please—Pulte’s own father and stepmother. Needless to say, Pulte did not refer these cases to the Justice department. (For details, see my “Trump’s Argument for Firing Lisa Cook Lies in Tatters,” September 2025.) A more accurate criticism of Bill Pulte, then, is not that he lacks experience in the intelligence field, but that he’s really bad at it. Also, Pulte doesn’t know when to quit. Even after all the facts I just recited came to light, Pulte made a similar referral concerning Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, a fierce Trump critic. Around the same time Pulte fired about a dozen ethics officials at FHFA, including the agency’s inspector general, who investigated internal agency complaints that Pulte obtained mortgage records improperly to punish political enemies. What Pulte lacks in finesse, he makes up in impunity.It could be argued that it doesn’t matter who ends up being the director of national intelligence, or DNI, because it’s a bullshit job. (That’s why it was given to the maladroit Gabbard in the first place.) The position was created after 9/11 to address a breakdown in communication among the various intelligence agencies prior to that catastrophe. But it’s never been clear what the director of national intelligence does all day except prepare the Presidential Daily Brief, which Trump doesn’t read. Indeed, Politico reported last month that during his first 16 months in office Trump couldn’t sit still for more than a dozen verbal intelligence briefings. He’d rather watch Fox News.
