Legislative Update: GSE Reform

Regularly over the course of the last few months, we have been asked by clients to update them on the status of GSE reform, and sometimes asked to predict when we will see significant progress toward GSE reform. As a result, we thought it would be helpful to provide an overview of the many bills now pending in Congress that would affect the GSEs. Currently, there are more than 20 distinct bills that address Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and more have been proposed but not yet formally introduced. As you will see from the summaries that follow, the bills are diverse—some call for discrete changes, while others call for winding down the GSEs or merging the GSEs into a single FHFA-regulated corporation without profits or shareholders. It may be too early yet to offer any informed guesses as to which of these bills will gain support, so we describe them all.