Federal Hiring Freeze Could Impact The Rollout Of Hmbs 2.0, Former Ginnie Mae Head Says

The recent executive actions of President Donald Trump could impede the implementation date of Ginnie Mae’s new complementary Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM)-backed Securities (HMBS) program — but not in the way you might think.

The president did hand down an order aiming to freeze outstanding rules and policies from taking effect, which would limit the Biden administration’s impact on the new Trump administration. But it’s actually Trump’s hiring freeze that could be more likely to delay what is referred to as “HMBS 2.0” from being implemented.

This is according to Ted Tozer, the former president of Ginnie Mae during the presidency of Barack Obama. Many of the career officials Tozer helped to bring to the government-owned company are nearing retirement, which could create issues for implementing new Ginnie Mae policies, including HMBS 2.0.

While the timing is difficult to predict at this point with acting leadership in place at key agencies, having the personnel on hand to execute is likely the biggest challenge facing the complementary securities program, Tozer explained.

“They’ve had some really critical retirements,” Tozer said in an interview with HousingWire’s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD). “People like Leslie Meaux [Pordzik], who was in charge of oversight of all the issuers and contacting all the account executives, and all the issues around the daily operation of dealing with doc custodians.”

Pordzik retired from Ginnie Mae last month, marking the end of a 36-year career in the mortgage finance industry. But she’s not the only one who’s getting ready to retire. Other key officials either already have or will soon retire, including a staffer who helped run Ginnie Mae’s securitization platform. They have yet to be replaced despite retiring about a year ago.

“The problem that I see right now — and I think it’s going to get worse — is Ginnie Mae’s inability to replace key people that I was able to hire when I was there 10 years ago,” Tozer said. He attributed some of his ability to hire “really good people” at that time to budget reductions at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac due to their federal conservatorship status, which allowed Tozer to recruit them at Ginnie Mae.

“The problem now is that Ginnie can’t really pay very well,” Tozer said, adding that the company’s pay scale is lower than at agencies such as the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC). This, he says, could create problems in recruiting for positions that are important to policy implementation efforts, including HMBS 2.0.

“I think that’s going to make getting things done at Ginnie Mae tougher, unless [the company] can actually pay more to be able to truly get more market-level people,” he said.

As far as HMBS 2.0 itself is concerned, Tozer said he has heard rumblings that the policy is harder to implement than originally anticipated. He took that to mean the actual work that will go into operationalizing the program.

He had hoped that decision-makers at the company would have taken a closer look at his own proposal that was published by the Urban Institute in late 2023.

“[HMBS issuers could] use Ginnie Mae–guaranteed commercial paper to fund the Ginnie Mae–required buyouts of loans that have hit their 98 percent maximum claim amount or have become inactive,” Tozer wrote of his proposal at the time.

Ginnie Mae announced work on what would become HMBS 2.0 last January under then-president Alanna McCargo. But McCargo resigned from the company and took another position with the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco. The work on HMBS 2.0 was assumed by Sam Valverde, who was appointed as Ginnie Mae’s acting president. And following the 2024 election, Valverde resigned from Ginnie Mae at the end of November.

Trump has not yet named a nominee to succeed McCargo as a permanent Ginnie Mae president, and he didn’t manage to confirm a Ginnie Mae president in his first term in the White House. Organizations such as the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) and the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association (NRMLA) have called on the Senate to swiftly confirm Scott Turner, Trump’s choice to lead the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the new term.

The MBA said that once Turner is confirmed, the government can focus on filling other critical housing positions at FHA, Ginnie Mae and elsewhere.