The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) issued a Request for Input (RFI) on social bond policies for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the GSEs). The RFI is intended to identify risks and opportunities for the GSEs to issue single-family social bonds, where currently they issue only multi-family social bonds, and provide input on the appropriate criteria and impact measures for a social bond designation. This follows on the adoption by the GSEs of their new Social Index methodology and the application of this methodology to lending pools that were not originally designated as social bonds.
In January, 2023, SFA submitted a letter to the GSEs in response to their proposed single family social index, recommending additional transparency and granularity into individual social metrics within the index.