As usual, the Trump administration’s proposed annual budget appears to be dead on arrival. It simply steps on too many legislative toes. Among the issues the budget will face is how Congress reacts to its treatment of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Despite four years of effort by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, members of the Federal Home Loan Bank system have made only marginal improvements in diversity on their boards, according to a report released late last month by the Government Accountability Office.

A class action lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York late last month, alleges that several of the dominant dealers in the debt instruments of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac colluded in a systematic price-fixing scheme between at least January 1, 2009, and April 27, 2014.

There are some worrying trends buried in the tables of Freddie Mac’s quarterly refinance statistics for 2018. This, of course, is just a small slice of the economic pie, but the data have all the hallmarks of another housing bubble.

In early March, just before the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association voted in favor of allowing the uniform mortgage-backed security for delivery in the to-be-announced market, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac hosted a conference.

Freddie Mac will restructure all future credit-risk transfer offerings through its flagship Structured Agency Credit Risk program as real estate mortgage investment conduits, Kevin Palmer, senior vice president for single-family credit risk transfer, said.

Mortgage sellers repurchased just $833.7 mil-lion of single-family loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage-backed securities last year, according to a new Inside the GSEs analysis. [Includes one data chart.]

A roundup of the week's developing news.

Joseph Otting’s dual role as acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency puts him in a position to push hard for changes that will help create a “healthy” non-agency mortgage market, according to the Structured Finance Industry Group.

President Trump earlier this week unleashed his fiscal year 2020 budget on Washington, chockful of implications for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.