Organization slams GSE leaders for excessive compensation

Citizens Against Government Waste, a nonprofit group that aims to cut wasteful taxpayer spending, bashed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for paying top executives a combined $35 million in 2009 and 2010. CAGW criticized the firms’ pay packages after reading the results of a new report released by the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s Office of Inspector General. CAGW said the report shows the CEOs at Fannie and Freddie earned a combined salary of $17 million with options to take home $24 million. “The IG report points out that, in 2009 at Fannie Mae, one of the performance benchmarks used to determine salaries was whether Fannie Mae executives would be able to sell a certain level of mortgage-backed securities (MBS),” CAGW said in a release. “Yet, the Federal Reserve was already planning on purchasing large amounts of Fannie’s MBS as a part of the company’s bailout package, hardly something that should have counted as a performance measure,” the organization said in its public complaint. The future of the GSEs continues to be a topic of discussion in Washington. The Federal Housing Finance Agency Acting Director Edward DeMarco pushed back against broad-sweeping GSE reforms posed by Republican lawmakers last week, while also saying he’s receptive to tweaking some of their proposed reforms. Write to Kerri Panchuk.