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80 80 INVESTMENT GOVERNMENT PROPERTY PRESERVATION IS THERE LIFE LEFT IN GSE REFORM? It has been 14 years since Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were put under full operational control of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) at the height of the financial crisis in September 2008. At the time, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson called the move a "timeout" reflecting the temporary nature of the move. According to Don Layton, the Senior Industry Fellow for the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, also the former CEO of Freddie Mac, believes that the Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) falling into conservatorship was widely regarded as the result of fundamental flaws in their operations and structure. As such, scores of people on all sides of the of the ordeal believed that a simple recapitalization and being returned to the private sector as a bad move. is situation created what came to be known as GSE reform, or the process of determining how to revise the country's housing finance system so that the GSEs could never endanger the country's financial stability again. Currently, there are no plans in Washington on GSE reform, meaning conservatorship will continue for the foreseeable future. e Biden administration has not shown a major interest in the topic of GSE reform. While there was a major focus on reform in 2009, the topic became a "back-burner" issue by 2017. Interest in reform picked up during the tenure of FHFA's then-Director Mark Calabria from 2019-2021, but not much discussion has happened since. Layton states that GSE reform is not dead as two activities are underway, even though the thought of exiting conservatorship appears to be in suspended animation. To better inform people on the subject, Layton proposed and answered four questions on the current state of GSE reform. What happened to all the big, bold proposals for GSE reform? e majority of big proposals for the GSEs occurred between 2009–2016 when interested parties from across the financial spectrum—including industry associations, policy advocates on both the political left and right, academics and, of course, government officials—looked to replace the entities with something different. Popular ideas included a single government-owned monopoly, breaking up the GSEs into smaller "mini-GSEs," turn it into one or two cooperatives owned by the mortgage industry, or winding down the GSEs and letting the private sector to replace loan volume. One GSE reform bill that got the furthest in congress was the bipartisan Corker-Warner Journal