Donald Trump has ordered America’s two housing-finance behemoths, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to buy as much as 200 billion dollars of mortgage-backed securities.

This is in an effort to revive a familiar lever of state intervention in a bid to lower borrowing costs and shore up voter confidence ahead of November’s midterm elections.

The president announced the directive on social media, arguing that large-scale bond purchases by the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) would push down mortgage rates and restore access to home ownership.

“Housing affordability”, Trump said, had been “absolutely destroyed” under the Biden administration.

The strategy harks back to the playbook used after the global financial crisis, when the federal government leaned heavily on Fannie and Freddie to stabilise housing markets.

The pair placed into conservatorship in 2008 after incurring catastrophic losse still sit at the heart of America’s 12 trillion dollars mortgage market, guaranteeing roughly half of outstanding home loans.

In recent months the GSEs have already been expanding their balance sheets. Their retained portfolios the mortgages and bonds they keep rather than securitise and sell grew by more than a quarter in the five months through October, according to regulatory data, reversing years of gradual contraction under tighter post-crisis rules.

Mortgage costs have indeed edged down. Freddie Mac’s weekly survey shows the average 30-year fixed rate falling to 6.16 percent in early January, close to its lowest level since October 2024, though still well above the sub- lev4 percent levels that fuelled the pandemic-era housing boom. Home prices, meanwhile, remain elevated, with national indices showing values roughly 40 percent higher than before Covid-19, leaving affordability stretched despite recent rate relief.

Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie, said the bond purchases could be rolled out rapidly. “We have the capability, we have the cash to do it,” he said, promising execution “in a very big way”.

The agency has previously signalled a willingness to use portfolio flexibility more aggressively, especially if financial markets show signs of renewed stress.

Critics warn that such intervention risks distorting markets and reigniting moral hazard, particularly if it encourages looser lending standards.