Last week, Florida Republican U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott joined more than 15 of their colleagues in leading a letter to the Biden administration’s Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director Sandra Thompson.
The letter expressed the senators’ outrage at Thompson’s proposal to penalize Americans who have managed their money responsibly in order to subsidize high-risk borrowers with low credit.
Proposals like these set a dangerous precedent, the Republican senators insisted.
In their letter, the senators wrote, “This shortsighted and counterproductive policy demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of the necessity of accurately tailoring housing finance products to credit risk and establishes a perverse incentive that punishes hardworking Americans for their fiscal prudence,” the letter said. “Under your leadership, FHFA has pushed forward a number of policy proposals and changes that seek to social-engineer the U.S. housing market in ways that increase riskiness and promote discrimination…The fact that a proposal flaunting credit risk is being openly pushed by FHFA just a decade-and-a-half after the housing-led 2008 financial crisis is staggering…The housing market should not be exploited as a means to pander to targeted demographics that you have chosen, nor an instrument to secure political favoritism.”
Author
