The NPR Politics Podcast - Why won't Trump sign a bipartisan housing bill?

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Congress overwhelmingly approved a bipartisan bill aimed at lowering the cost of buying a home, and President Trump was set to sign it Wednesday. But then Trump announced he won't sign the bill until Congress passes a strict voter ID law. We discuss what to make of Trump's apparent reversal and how it affects Republicans' efforts at retaining control of Congress this November. This episode: senior political correspondent Tamara Keith, personal finance reporter Stephan Bisaha, and senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

So this crazy thing happened yesterday. The stage was set for President Trump to sign a big bipartisan bill to address the cost of housing in America. And when I say the stage was set, it was literally set. There was a stage in the Capitol. The presidential seal was attached to the table where the president was going to sit and sign the bill. And then at the last minute, the president said he wasn't going to sign it. I said it around signing the housing bill. I want to see what happens. Look, the housing bill is, I made billions of dollars with housing. I know housing better than anybody, maybe anywhere. And that's what we're talking about on the pod today. The housing bill and the political implications of this blow up. So let's get to it.

Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. I'm Stephen Missaha. I cover personal finance. And I'm Mara Liason, Senior National. political correspondent. And we are recording this podcast at 105 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, June 25th. And Stephen, let's get right to it. What is this bill designed to do? You know, this is the largest piece of housing legislation in literal decades.

And it's really all about housing affordability. There's not just like one main way it tries to get to that. Like Elizabeth Warren, Senator who was co-sponsoring this bill, she basically described like a giant meatball. It's got all these different ingredients in it to try and help. And really, ingredients that came from different Republicans and Democrats. This is truly a bipartisan bill, not just in votes, but also in how the whole thing got ridden and put together. And Mara, as Stephen says, this was a bipartisan bill. You have Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat and Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican, sort of pushing this through

together. Given how little Congress gets done these days and how little of that is bipartisan, this almost seemed remarkable. It was remarkable. It was almost like a cosmic joke on Congress. All of a sudden, they finally did what the public says they want Congress to do, work across the aisle, focus on a problem that a vast majority of voters once solved, like how hard it is to buy a home, make compromises. But then Trump, blew it up at the last moment. And the thing that's even more remarkable is that we had never heard any real policy objections from him or the White House. And the White House had even praised the bill, I think, just hours before he decided not to sign it. So this reminds us that this is a very

personalist presidency. It's governed by what Donald Trump wants at a given moment. And he wants a different bill passed, the SAVE Act, where there are not the votes to pass it. So we will get to that, but I want to dig in a little bit more on what this bipartisan bill did. You know, President Trump talked about it in his state of the union address. He told this story of a mom from Texas who was trying to buy a house and she bid on 20 different homes only to lose out each time to private equity firms that were paying cash. He called for a ban on large Wall Street investment firms buying up homes by the thousands. And now I'm asking Congress to make that ban. permanent because homes for people, really. That's what we want. We want homes for people, not for

corporations. Corporations are doing just fine. So, Stephen, does this bill do what President Trump was asking for? It does. I mean, it's not a full permanent ban, but if this bill were to become law at some point, somehow now, it would put a cap. Essentially, if you're a large investor, you cannot own more than 350 homes. Now, how much this would actually help with housing affordability? How is I mean, private equity is a small part of the housing market right now. But it is a big slice in some areas like Atlanta, where you are hearing about private equity putting down these all-cash offers and making it so other people, families can't really compete. And, you know, there's warnings that, like, that could spread to other areas, and this bill would cap on that. And what else is in this bill?

Well, the main thing it's trying to do is dress housing affordability by increasing supply. So think classic supply and demand. you increase the supply ahead of demand, then you're going to lower prices. Now, Congress cannot just say, hey, we order millions of new houses to get built. Instead, what this bill tries to do is encourage home building, mainly by cutting back on some federal regulations, really making it easier for home builders actually start doing this. There's no actually new money in here. It's kind of shuffling old money around.

And like, it also has like, you know, a lot of housing is actually local. So it has this provision in there that says places that build more, communities that build more, they will get more federal dollars and places that build less will get less. So ideally encouraging more kind of local innovation and changes to zoning laws. But again, there is no new money in here. So if you compare it to like previous really big piece of housing legislation, like this current bill is not like the GI Bill, which is now more than 80 years old, which had these great like kind of loan options. for veterans and then the Housing Choice Voucher Program for the 1970s, essentially Section 8,

that does still provide financing for low-income people to afford housing. This doesn't do any of that. This is a much more conservative bill. It is not about government spending and expanding that. If it's anything, it's about getting the federal government out of the way to encourage more home building. That's why it passed with such big margins. And that brings us to yesterday. Shortly before that bill signing ceremony, President Trump started post.

Morrow, what did he say? He took to his favorite communications medium, social media, and he attacked the bill because of one of its sponsors, Elizabeth Warren, and he used a racial slur about her that he's used many times in the past. He said, quote, the Elizabeth Pocahontas Warren-centric housing bill. He went on to say that it is of minor importance compared to lowering interest rates, FISA, Save America Act. And then he went on to tell Congress to terminate the filibuster.

So he's belittling the importance of housing when voters across the board say housing is one of their most important issues. He also posted today's housing news conference and signing is hereby canceled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE Act. He says which I consider to be a national emergency. And remember, he is the national emergency president. He has used national emergencies as an excuse to do all sorts of things, many of which have been subsequently knocked down by the courts.

And he has also, in the not so distant past, said he wouldn't sign another bill because he wanted the Save Act passed first. So this is actually – That's right. He's threatened – yes, he's threatened this before. But this is the first time he's actually had a bill ready to – literally ready to go. Quite literally. And just to explain what the Save Act would do, it would require voter ID, proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. And it would put limitations on voting by mail. Some of these provisions are popular. Others are not. Others divide even Republicans. And Republican senators just keep telling him that this bill, his Save America Act, does not have the votes to pass. So Mara, what do you make of this move by the president? I think it's an expression of how frustrated Donald Trump is on the limits of his power because he sees his powers as unlimited. Whether it's his own Republicans in the Senate, who although they are pretty darn loyal to, him. Don't do every single thing he wants when he wants them to do it. Or maybe it's Iran who has not unconditionally surrendered. He can't bend reality to his will all the time. And he's really frustrated. So he picked up the first tool he could, which is, I'm not going

to sign this bill. Now, at the same time, he's doing something to really undermine his own Republicans who were hoping that this bill would give them a big boost in the midterms. All right, we're going to talk more about those political implications when we get back. But first, a quick break. And we're back. And Mara, as you alluded to, Republicans need something to run on in this midterm election. They currently have a governing trifecta. They have the House, the House, the House, and they need to convince the American people that after November, they should still have all that power.

Did Trump not signing this bill just undermine those efforts? I think he did if Democrats can take advantage of it. If they start running ads that say, you know, Congress voted to give you help with housing, Donald Trump threw it in the garbage can. Or Donald Trump says the housing bill is of minor importance. He doesn't care about people like you. I mean, there's a million iterations of this. So I think this is just yet another example of Trump saying something or doing something that Republicans really worry is going to hurt their chances. the midterms. And that does depend if Democrats can take advantage of it. And I think I was even more

surprised rather than him not signing the bill, the fact that he gave credit to it to a Democrat, Senator Elizabeth Warren. I mean, this bill was so bipartisan. And I kept on hearing that, oh, everyone's getting behind it because of the midterms. They want this big housing legislation to go on. But again, it was Republicans and Democrats. So it's like, well, they're running against each other who gets credit for this at the end of the day. And he essentially handed credit over two Democrats. And I did call up Senator Elizabeth Warren after this, and I asked her about him basically saying this was her bill. He wants to blame Democrats and blame me for busting our tails to try to lower costs for American families. Well, bring on the blame. And Senator Warren,

she did thank Republicans who worked hard to make this actually happen, but she said what really matters is actually delivering. And right now we have a Republican president that is stopping that. Owning a home is a major part of the idea that is the American dream. And it's just something that feels so unattainable to so many people right now, especially young people. There was this report recently from the real estate company Redfin. And in order to afford the average home available for sale in America right now, a family needs to make around $117,000 a year. That's around 30-ish thousand dollars more than what the typical American family does make. And I mean, the median age for first-time homebuyers, it is now 40 years old because of this.

And as a 35-year-old renter, I do appreciate I have not fallen behind. But, you know, Trump was in Davos in January and he said Americans will not become a nation of renters. But, you know, the math is keeping a lot of us as renters. Yeah, a little more math for me. What is the median home price right now in America? It's around $400,000, which is around $100,000 more than it was around the start of the pandemic. That's a remarkable increase. Yeah, it's huge.

You know, it seems like Trump is really misreading the room for these midterm elections. I mean, the conversations that I've had with voters in focus groups or elsewhere, I can't think of a midterm where voters have been as cynical, as angry, as bitter, feeling. like not only is the American dream not attainable anymore and the American dream is pretty simple. If you work hard and play by the rules, you can do as well or better than your parents. We're in a populist moment and Donald Trump used to be pretty good at hitching a ride on that. That's how he got elected in the first place. But it seems like he's almost going out of his way to paint himself and his party as people who don't care about ordinary Americans and their struggles and they do feel they're struggling.

as I've said before, they don't think they're poor, but they do feel broke. And this seems to be really tone deaf. And in a normal election year, it would really hurt the incumbent party. We don't know if this is going to be a normal election year because we've had extreme partisan gerrymandering. And the Republican Party, you know, has other big, big structural advantages. Well, and Mara, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about the fact that the president is holding up this housing affordability. bill to push for an elections-related bill. That's right. He acts like he doesn't care about the elections. He's even said famously.

I don't care about the midterms. But that bill that he once passed, the SAVE Act, would give him Republicans, the federal government, a tremendous amount of new power over the mechanics of voting. And critics say it would give them, him, the ability to undermine legitimately cast votes. So he seems to be very concerned about the outcome of elections, concerned enough to blow up a housing bill in order to pass his voting legislation. But at the same time, almost every day he says something that undercuts his party's ability to win the midterms. So I can't really explain that. I'm not sure either. One thing I'm wondering about, though, is this bill was so popular. It passed with such overwhelming

one might say veto-proof majorities. Is there a way that this thing still becomes law and isn't dead whether Trump wants it or not? Absolutely, because if Donald Trump gets the bill, and of course he hasn't gotten it yet officially, the House has to send it to him, and he waits 10 days and he doesn't sign it or veto it, well, it becomes law. Then he gets the worst of both worlds. He doesn't get any credit because he trashed the thing and it goes into effect anyway and Democrats can claim credit. Yeah, so I guess we will see what happens. I do know that Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, at the time of this taping,

is set to meet with President Trump today at the White House, and this housing bill is on the agenda. So it's possible Trump ends up signing it after all or who knows, but we will continue following it. All right, we are going to leave it there for today. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. I'm Stephen Misaha, and I cover personal finance. And I'm Mara Liason, Senior National Political Correspondent.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.