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Weekly Washington Policy Pulse: Trump's Push on Housing Costs, DHS (Feb. 9, 2026)
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Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts.
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Radio News this is your weekly Washington Policy Pulse on the Balance of Power podcast. I'm Joe Matthew. Every Monday, Bloomberg Intelligence senior policy analyst and friend of the show, Nathan Dean shares his weekly call on upcoming catalysts in the nation's capital. Listen for the most recent and relevant policy research from our team at Bloomberg Intelligence. Now with today's installment, here's Nathan Dean.
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Good morning and good afternoon everybody. My name is Nathan Dean. I am a senior Policy analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence here in the Washington, D.C. bureau. I want to say welcome for joining us on the Washington Policy Bulls and also for those of you who are listening via the Balance of Power podcast, welcoming you as well. This is the call where Every Monday at 10am Eastern we get together and we talk about what's going on this week. And speaking of what's going on this week, well, we are five days away from a partial, partial, partial, partial government shutdown. I Jo it's actually the Department of Homeland Security is what we're talking about this week. Just had a client call earlier this morning and talking about this and so I just wanted to give you my key thoughts on this is that you know what is happening this week is we are debating about the funding of the Department of Homeland Security. It is one of the 12 appropriation bills that makes up the US government. Those other 11 bills have all been passed and that has been essentially funded the rest of the US government up until September 30th. But for the 266,000 individuals that work for The Department of Homeland Security, their funding runs out on Friday. Now, there's been a lot of discussion about what's going to happen here. And I think on this call we've talked about in the past that Immigration and custom enforcement, the ICE agency already has $75 billion appropriated through it up until fiscal year 2029. So what the Democrats are pushing right now is a change of ICE tactics rather than levels of ICE funding. You have five days to figure it out. There's pretty much no agreement whatsoever on where to move moving forward. And so either one of two things is going to happen. One is we're going to have a shutdown and the Department of Homeland Security will effectively shut down and then they'll have to figure this out. For what it's worth, the House is out next week, so is the Senate. The Munich Security Conference starts on Friday. And just being a little bit on the snarky side here, nobody. There are bipartisan members that are going to that conference. They don't want to stick around in Washington and deal with this when they should be in Germany eating schnitzel. So two things, one of two things is going to happen. One is the department will shut down and those individuals who work for Dean DHS are essentially going to have to work for approximately a week until Congress comes back and gets this done or they're going to kick the can with another continuing resolution, a two or three week continuing resolution, which is, I think, where both sides of this are going forward. For what it's worth, there is some discussion about potentially stripping ICE out of this and then doing it. Appropriations for like individually for FEMA or Coast Guard or the Transportation and Security Administration, tsa. Too soon to tell on where we're going with that. My story, though is that from the market perspective, you know, this, this shutdown, if it occurs, isn't really going to have any market impacts. And for clarity's sake, in terms of like BLS reports and other data reports and other things like that, you can essentially say that we have clarity through September 30th of the rest of this year because the rest of the government is funded. I'm going to come out and say that there's not going to be a shutdown in September 30th because nobody wants to shut the government down one month before the midterm elections. You're probably not going to have a shutdown during the lame duck period. Where I'm going with this is that you probably have until March 2027 until we have the next significant shutdown threat. We should also point though, is that for every single moment that Congress is focused on DHS funding, it's a moment they're not talking about other things like housing and crypto. Now, the reason reason why I bring up housing is that's going to be the next big push you're going to see coming out from Congress. Just this week, the House is going to most likely take up and pass a bill called the Housing for 21st Century Act. This comes out of the House Services Committee. What you need to know about this is that, yes, it's part of President Trump's affordability push, but this bill in particular is pretty bipartisan and it really doesn't have anything all there exciting for us who are looking at it from the equity market standpoint, it's not really going to do much things in terms of driving up new homes or whether it's cuts, yes, it cuts some regulatory red tape. It actually makes things a little bit more, aims to make government bureaucracy a little bit more efficient. But this is going to most likely pass the House this week and the Senate has its own separate bill. And if you heard my discussion last week, you heard the Senate Banking Committee has pushed crypto off for a month to deal with housing. That's what the Senate Banking Committee is going to be looking at is housing for the next month. And then they're going to come together and try and reconcile it. The thing about US policy, and I know that we have a lot of non US Investors on this call right now, the thing about housing policy, you should note though, is, is that it's not so much a federal issue, but rather it's a state and local issue. And, and it's almost like a third rail of US Politics because when President Trump comes says I want to make housing more affordable, are you doing that to the detriment of homeowners who see the value of their homes going down, or are you trying to do this for individuals that don't have homes that actually want to see those home prices go down? You get the idea here is that it's very difficult. And under the Biden administration, Vice President Kamala Harris was the one was tasked with this. And a lot of people in Washington thought that this was a thankless role of tasking her with this because a, the federal government really doesn't have all that much to do. And Biden, it's actually very difficult to get it right. It's a Goldilocks strategy, if you will. But one thing I do want to point out is just last week Bloomberg News reported that there potentially could be an antitrust investigation of US Homebuilders. I would direct you to a note that my colleague Jennifer rewrote and put on the terminal and she essentially said, and I'm just going to paraphrase here is that yes, you can launch an investigation, but it's much more difficult to actually prove an investigation than or prove that actually antitrust allegations existed. The idea here is is that this potential investigation, if it actually were to come out at this point, is more bark than bite. I'll defer you to Jen, though, on the specifics. So if you want to talk more about housing, contact me. I'll put you in with Jen and or our housing analyst, Drew Redding. So let's talk about crypto a little bit. Just last week we saw Treasury Secretary Scott Besant testify to the House Financial Services Committee and Senate Banking Committee. I really didn't get much out of it. I watched all five and a half hours of it. I really didn't get all that much. But a couple of interesting things I want on crypto I wanted to point out, especially in the volatility that we're seeing with bitcoin at the moment. One is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant reiterated that he's not going to go out there, and I'm paraphrasing here, use taxpayer dollars to purchase bitcoin. Now there is legislation out there from Senator Cynthia Lummis that would direct the US Government to purchase bitcoin. It's not going to go anywhere when Treasury Secretary Scott Bessen says he doesn't have the authority to do that and not going to go anywhere. For what it's worth, I actually think they do have the authority. I think they could use the Exchange Stabilization Fund to actually go out and purchase new bitcoin. But I don't think it's going to happen. My note is 30% chance you're going to see a change of this in US Policy. So if you're looking for any type of relief for bitcoin purchases, it's not going to come there. And then on the crypto side, like I just mentioned, Senate Banking Committee is working on housing. They've pushed crypto off. But Senator Lummis did state last week when she was doing a news interview that Senator John Thune, the majority leader, said that he would dedicate time to the Senate floor to this crypto bill sometime, quote, unquote, in the spring. In my mind, that means April and May. So if you're looking for passage on this crypto market structure bill you're looking at somewhere around April or May, I have a much more in depth call. I did a video on the crypto policy where we are. So if you have any more questions on that, just let me know and I'll direct you to that. A couple other things just real quickly. It's going to be a short call this week. A couple of things to keep in mind. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from Israel is going to be coming to the White House. So if you're looking at geopolitical risk and specifically in terms of US Iran negotiations, our friends over at Bloomberg Geoeconomics actually put out their analysis just this morning on where they think things are going. But you may see some headlines tied to Wednesday's visit. We are also telling our clients just an update on the Supreme Court IEIPA case. February 20th is the first date that the Supreme Court could come back unless they do an emergency or, you know, non scheduled release. But Holly Fromm thinks February 20th is the first state that you're gonna see. The Supreme Court could potentially come back and deal with tariffs. And then a little bit on the lighter side, the House is actually taking up legislation this week to create a new $2.50 coin to commemorate America's 250th anniversary. You know, our European friends know this that the we actually do have a dollar coin. It doesn't really go anywhere. I actually used one at the grocery store about six months ago and the grocery store actually thought I was using fake currency. So that's pretty much why nobody uses coins at the moment. But anyway, House is going to take up a bill to actually try and mint a $2.50 coin. So smaller call today, shorter call today. But again, I want to say thank you for listening. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out and we'll talk soon.
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Our thanks to Nathan Dean, Bloomberg Intell Senior Policy Analyst, bringing you the latest installment of his weekly Washington Policy Pulse. For more from BI or to join this call live each week you can email nathan@ndeanloomberg.net that's n d e a n bloomberg.net come back to the podcast later today for the latest edition of Balance of Power.
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