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56 In the Bush administration, we had Hurricane Katrina; we had others. If you remember, just before the 2004 election, Florida was in play, and then, all of a sudden, Florida got hit with three or four hurricanes. In the office I was working in at the time, Cabinet Affairs, we had a significant role in dealing with the aftermath, helping to coordinate the non-FEMA portion. ere were workforce grants out of the Department of Labor. Grants were coming out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture for people who lost crops, things of that nature. You get an enormous sense of satisfaction helping your fellow Americans, not just in their times of distress, but even in the things HUD does—helping people have a roof over their heads. It's about helping people; it's about service, that commitment to a team and doing something bigger than you. It's exhilarating, and it's refreshing to see the happiness on a family's face when they move into their first home or a family that was able to get a roof over their head after a natural disaster. When you were at FHA, one of the things you helped work on was helping design the administration's modernization bill. Could you talk about the issues you were trying to solve with that and your thoughts on its impact and legacy? For some time in my first term, the Republicans had the House and the White House. You recall in '06, we lost the House, so we had been working with the Democrats, and the Republicans were supportive of FHA modernization. We wanted FHA back in the game because FHA's market share had shrunk to 2%. I remember Republicans telling me, "You need to go get the Democrats' support." And even when we had the House, we had two willing supporters in Barney Frank and Maxine Waters. e political climate was less acrimonious back then, and we were able to get it through the House 415 to 7, making it much more bipartisan. en, of course, I got kneecapped in the Senate, but that's a different story. I always told people that FHA's got to be there in the good times and in the bad times because when the private capital runs for the hills, you will need an FHA that can pump liquidity into the market when it's needed. I thought FHA did a heroic job in that effort, just helping many people finance out of a subprime loan, many of whom were delinquent. You were FHA Commissioner during the housing crisis. How did that shape your understanding of the political nature of your job, as well as what housing priorities needed to be focused on down the line to solve future crises? It pulled back the curtain on how important FHA is in the safety of a 30-year, fully amortizing mortgage. Unfortunately, the market got a little too creative with some of their products and opened the aperture a little too wide, and we all know what happened. At the end of the day, whether people were refinancing with FHA or getting a purchase loan through FHA insurance, again, it was just putting a big exclamation point as to why FHA is so critical. People try to politicize it sometimes. [But] I told people back then when it was only a $600 billion corporation, FHA has an important countercyclical role to play, and today it's a $1.3 trillion corporation. First and foremost, you want to help people refinance and save their homes and help those who are ready to buy a home, all the while trying to be self-sufficient without having to get taxpayer help, which I think we were pretty good about. "You get an enormous sense of satisfaction helping your fellow Americans." Cover Story By: David Wharton

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