Three Democratic lawmakers are requesting information about a recent round of firings at Fannie Mae, the Federal National Mortgage Association, and whether the fired employees received due process.
Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, announced last week that the government-sponsored enterprise had fired at least 100 employees who were “caught engaging in unethical conduct, including facilitating fraud, against our great company.”
But the lawmakers are concerned that Fannie Mae fired the employees with little transparency, and they say they’re suspicious that most of the employees appear to be Indian American. In a letter requesting additional information, they said that many of the fired employees had donated to organizations connected to the Indian American community through Fannie Mae’s matching gift program, which matches charitable contributions made by employees of up to $5,000, according to Fannie Mae’s website.
That’s left some lawmakers arguing this amounts to baseless accusations of fraud against employees with little in common outside of their backgrounds.
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“I’m confused, and the only thing I can think of is that they simply targeted an entire group of people with Indian American backgrounds,” Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, who represents many of the fired employees in his Northern Virginia district, told NOTUS. “I have serious doubts that all these people committed fraud, but they deserve explanation and some evidence pointing to the exact fraud that supposedly happened. In this case we’re not getting that.”
Fannie Mae has provided few additional details about the firings, and Fannie Mae and the Federal Housing Finance Agency did not respond to a request for comment.
“Most if not all of the donations made by terminated employees were to organizations linked to the Indian American community,” the lawmakers wrote. “We have even heard that some Indian American employees were terminated despite having never donated to one of these groups or participated in the Matching Gift Program.”
Subramanyam and Reps. Shri Thanedar and Raja Krishnamoorthi, who are all Democrats and are Indian Americans, wrote the letter to Pulte and Priscilla Almodovar, Fannie Mae’s president and CEO, requesting a briefing on the terminations by Monday.
“Based on the available evidence, we are concerned that participation in the Matching Gift Program or donations to specific Indian American organizations may have been used as a pretext to make indiscriminate cuts to Fannie Mae’s workforce and to tarnish employees’ reputations with allegations of fraud without an investigation,” the lawmakers wrote.
When asked last Wednesday about the firings, Pulte told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham that “it’s an ongoing investigation.”
“I will say that we found that multiple people were working two jobs. We found some people were working in China and saying that they were working here,” Pulte said on Fox. “We also found out that they were making donations to the charity and then they were getting kickbacks, the internal company charity.”
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Amelia Benavides-Colón is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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