President Trump on Friday signed two executive orders targeting the regulatory thicket that has made homeownership increasingly unattainable for millions of Americans.

The first order directs federal agencies to slash construction and permitting barriers. The second streamlines the mortgage process so smaller community banks can get back in the lending business.

Together, they represent the most direct executive action on housing affordability in years, and White House officials say potential homebuyers could see the impact in a matter of months.

What the Orders Actually Do

The first order attacks the problem from the supply side. Federal agencies are directed to reduce their own regulatory burdens on housing construction and create incentives for state and local governments to adopt best practices, including a 60-day deadline for approving building permits, according to NewsMax. The order takes aim at several specific chokepoints:

• Curtailing "green" building codes and reducing design and building mandates
• Making it easier to deploy innovative construction methods
• Directing the EPA and secretary of the Army to review and update stormwater, wetlands, and other water-related permitting requirements
• Instructing the Departments of Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation, along with the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to eliminate regulations reducing residential development
• Simplifying historic review guidance through the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation
• Aligning the New Markets Tax Credit program with Opportunity Zone tax breaks created during Trump's first term

Multiple federal agencies would also work to eliminate environmental and energy efficiency regulations that increase costs and restrict home construction. White House officials noted that Biden-era energy efficiency mandates in HUD and Agriculture Department guidelines alone could add up to $9,000 to housing construction costs.

Nine thousand dollars per home. Multiply that across an industry already struggling to build enough units, and you begin to see how Washington's green mandates translate directly into priced-out families.

The second executive order directs the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to change its mortgage guidelines so that smaller banks can engage in more lending. The CFPB would also update requirements under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act to lessen the regulatory burdens for obtaining a mortgage. This matters because community banks are often the institutions most willing to work with first-time buyers and borrowers in smaller markets, precisely the people squeezed hardest by the current environment.

Notably, the first order does not seek to change state and local zoning codes. The federal government is cleaning its own house, not dictating to local communities how to run theirs.

The Numbers That Forced the Issue

The median price of an existing home sold in February was $398,000. That total is nearly five times the median household income. The historic rule of thumb was that homes generally cost three times the household income. The gap between those two numbers is not an abstraction. It is the reason an entire generation of Americans under the age of 40 made housing a defining issue in November's election.

Mortgage rates have eased somewhat. The average 30-year rate in February was 6.05%, down from 6.84% a year ago. But that is still a world away from the sub-3% averages that occurred in 2020 and 2021. Lower rates help at the margins. They do not solve a problem rooted in the fact that America simply does not build enough homes, largely because government at every level has made building them extraordinarily expensive and slow.

A draft of the order stated it plainly:

"Layers of unnecessary regulatory barriers, slow permitting processes, and onerous mandates at all levels of government have delayed construction, restricted development, and driven up the costs of new housing."

Building More Without Crashing Values

Trump has been clear-eyed about the tension at the heart of housing policy. More construction means more supply, which should moderate prices. But 65 million American homeowners already have their wealth tied to the value of their property. At his January Cabinet meeting, Trump addressed this directly:

"People that own their homes, we're going to keep them wealthy. We're going to keep those prices up. We're not going to destroy the value of their homes so that somebody that didn't work very hard can buy a home."

The approach reflected in these orders threads that needle. Rather than artificially flooding the market or imposing federal zoning mandates that would crater existing home values, the strategy removes the government-created costs that inflate the price of new construction. A home that costs $9,000 less to build because Washington stopped requiring unnecessary energy mandates does not reduce the value of the home next door. It just means fewer buyers are priced out of the market by bureaucratic overhead.

Trump has also moved on the demand side, previously directing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200 billion in mortgage bonds and calling for limiting the ability of financial institutions to buy homes. That combination, making it cheaper to build and easier to borrow while keeping institutional investors from gobbling up inventory, addresses the problem from multiple angles without requiring existing homeowners to take the hit.

Congress Moves Too, For Once

The executive orders arrive alongside rare legislative momentum. On Thursday, the Senate passed a broad bipartisan bill on housing, and the White House said in a March 2 statement that it supported passage of the measure. Its fate in the House remains uncertain, but the fact that both branches are moving on the same issue simultaneously is itself notable.

For years, housing affordability was treated as a local problem or, worse, as an excuse to push progressive wish-list items like federal zoning overrides and green building mandates. The result was predictable: costs went up, construction slowed down, and the people who could least afford it bore the burden.

These orders represent a different theory. The federal government did not create the housing crisis by doing too little. It created the crisis by doing too much, badly, and then layering more on top. The fix is not another program. It is getting out of the way.

Sixty-five million homeowners are watching. So are the millions who want to join them. For the first time in a long time, Washington is working on making that possible rather than making it harder.