Former CFPB official criticized for blog posts joins Ginnie Mae

Ginnie Mae has hired Eric Blankenstein, a former political appointee at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who sparked controversy over writings more than a decade ago in which he used a racial slur, sources said.

Blankenstein, a former CFPB policy associate director for supervision and enforcement, resigned from the CFPB in May.

Ginnie, the government-owned company that oversees a $2 trillion portfolio of mortgage-backed securities, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Blankenstein came under fire after The Washington Post first reported he had used a pen name in blog posts from 2004 suggesting that people who use racial slurs are not necessarily racist and that most hate crimes were “hoaxes.”

He worked at the CFPB for 18 months. Before that, Blankenstein had been an assistant general counsel for six months at the Office of the United States Trade Representative. He previously had been an associate at Williams & Connolly for eight years.

Ginnie is led by Acting President Maren Kasper, a Trump political appointee and former senior White House adviser, who previously had been an investment associate for a year at Dwell Finance, a division of the fintech firm B2R Finance.

Ginnie’s growth has raised concerns about how it is staffed to manage risks. Ginnie’s roughly 130 employees oversee 430 issuers, most of them nonbank mortgage lenders.

Last month, the Government Accountability Office raised concerns about Ginnie’s staffing issues, including what it called a “heavy reliance on contractors” and a limited budget for in-house staff.