President Joe Biden has nominated Alanna McCargo, a senior advisor for housing finance within the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, to be the new head of Ginnie Mae.
If confirmed, McCargo would be the first permanent leader of Ginnie Mae in almost five years since President Ted Tozer resigned in 2017.
McCargo has decades of experience in the housing industry and has focused on how America’s housing finance system can equitably provide credit and capital to households and affordable housing stakeholders. Prior to her position at HUD, McCargo served as the vice president for the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where she led and developed research programming in collaboration with key housing industry, nonprofit, and government agencies.
She also was the executive director of the mortgage servicing collaborative, a “cross-sector initiative that identified and developed policy recommendations for mortgage servicing and securitization reform to enable a more stable housing finance system,” according to the White House release.
Before her time at the Urban Institute, McCargo spent time as the vice president and head of government solutions at CoreLogic, vice president at JP Morgan Chase’s home lending division, and senior director of servicing portfolio management at Fannie Mae.
In her 10 years at Fannie Mae, she led policy development and secondary mortgage market programs, played a central role in the company’s partnership with the U.S. Department of the Treasury when working on the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, and was instrumental in the work with the Federal Housing Finance Agency on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage servicing alignment efforts.
The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) applauded McCargo’s nomination.
“Ginnie Mae is a critically important agency in our housing finance system, and Alanna has a deep understanding of the agency and a demonstrated track record of working with industry, government, and housing advocates on key housing policy issues,” MBA President and CEO Robert Broeksmit said. “MBA looks forward to working with her, and other senior staff at Ginnie Mae, on ways to enhance liquidity for Ginnie Mae mortgage-backed securities and help make affordable residential and rental housing a reality for millions of low- and moderate-income households by channeling global capital into the nation's housing markets.”