Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) blasted a top Trump official Thursday for gutting the watchdog that polices his agency, causing him to melt down.
Bill Pulte, who leads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has moved to sharply shrink the office of the agency's inspector general, The New York Times reported. The move led congressional Democrats to call for his resignation.
At a hearing Thursday, Warren accused Pulte of "unlawfully shutting down the work of the inspector general responsible for investigating misconduct at the Federal Housing Finance Agency and in multitrillion-dollar mortgage markets," per The Times.
She then read from a letter that staffers in the inspector general's office had sent to Congress, laying out what the cuts would do to their work.
"We will be forced to reduce staffing by approximately 70-80% in FY 2027, which will result in the discontinuance of essentially all criminal investigations conducted by our Office of Investigations," the letter stated.
Warren warned that homebuyers would pay the price.
"These cuts will mean more fraud in the mortgage market, more cheating of families, higher costs for people trying to buy a home," she said. She added that the real goal was to protect Pulte from scrutiny over his investigations of the president's critics.
Pulte answered on social media with the nickname Trump long used to mock the senator.
"Elizabeth 'Pocahontas' Warren is introducing a bill tonight to kill this good financial stewardship to align our IG's office with its Peer IG Offices," he wrote.
He added that "Pocahontas wants to waste precious federal money like a drunken sailor."
In a statement, Pulte's agency said it was only trying to "right-size" an office it considers bloated. It said the inspector general there takes up 16 percent of the agency's operating budget, compared with about 2 percent at other agencies. "F.H.F.A. is not cutting oversight," the agency said, per The Times.
This is the second time the Trump administration has moved to limit oversight of Pulte. Last November, it removed acting inspector general Joe Allen after Democrats asked him to look into Pulte's investigations of Trump rivals such as Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Mark Greenblatt, the former Interior Department inspector general whom Trump fired, rejected Pulte's comparison. He noted that the FHFA watchdog has a nationwide mandate to investigate mortgage fraud.
"In my 20 years in the oversight community, it is unheard of for an agency head to cut an OIG's budget and effectively try to starve them out of existence," Greenblatt told The Times.
