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Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and chair of the boards at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, said in an interview on Tuesday that a handful of employees at the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) who are from U.S. geopolitical foes China and North Korea have been referred to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
Pulte was interviewed by Bloomberg TV at The Milken Institute Global Conference. He was asked about the ongoing effort to privatize the GSEs before speaking about what he has seen at the agencies that has caused him concern.
Among these elements, Pulte suggested that people from China and North Korea were embedded at the GSEs, posing as contractors or other staffers.
“We’ve heard, for instance, [and] recently criminally referred some North Koreans and Chinese for working inside of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” Pulte said in the interview. “I mean, what are the Chinese and the North Koreans doing in these companies?”
He added that his oversight efforts increasingly involve scrutiny of contracts at the FHFA, as well as the “bureaucracy” between the GSEs and the U.S. housing system. But Bloomberg reporter Sonali Basak returned to the topic of foreign nationals working inside the GSEs themselves.
Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte says he is focusing on making Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac operationally efficient during an interview with @sonalibasak at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California https://t.co/EVEc0g5HvJ pic.twitter.com/ESSLnwDf00
— Bloomberg TV (@BloombergTV) May 6, 2025
“When you said that there were Chinese and North Koreans working for the agency, do you mean non-U.S. citizens?” she asked. Pulte said that was correct.
“There were non-citizens working who were posing as either real Americans, or in some cases contractors,” Pulte said. “And we also recently uncovered some other things where some of the Indians were also working inside of the companies as well.”
This could be a reference to recent staff cuts at Fannie Mae, where roughly 100 employees were fired for unethical conduct stemming from a matching grants program.
Pulte added that there was “more to come on that,” before jumping back into the topic of North Korean and Chinese nationals.
“I think we’ve referred five or six different people to the DOJ, just in terms of North Koreans and Chinese working in the companies,” he said.
China and the U.S. are currently locked in a trade war tied to tariffs initially imposed by the U.S. on Chinese imports, although economic dialogue has been ongoing and the trade relationship between the countries is well documented.
The U.S. has long had an acrimonious relationship with North Korea, stemming from the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War and established a demilitarized zone to separate it from South Korea, an economic and military ally of the U.S.
The DOJ has not announced any criminal indictments related to Pulte’s statements.
