Mar 15, 2026
On March 4, The Capitol Forum held a conference call with conference call with Jon Schweppe, Director of Policy Initiatives at American Principles Project, to discuss new policy proposals aimed at addressing housing affordability, including Schweppe’s recent proposal to create tax-advantaged Home Savings Accounts designed to help Americans save for homeownership. The full transcript, which has been modified slightly for accuracy, can be found below.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Welcome. I’m Teddy Downey, Executive Editor here at The Capitol Forum. Today, I’m very pleased to be joined by Jon Schweppe, Director of Policy Initiatives at American Principles Project. Jon previously served at the Federal Trade Commission under Chairman Andrew Ferguson and has worked on a range of policy issues related to competition, consumer protection, and economic policy. Jon, thank you so much for doing this today.
JON SCHWEPPE: Hey, great to connect with you, Teddy, and great to be back on the outside. It’s kind of fun.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Can we just start off—for the people in the audience who are not familiar with American Principles Project—can you just walk us through what your group is all about, and sort of the political world that you guys inhabit? Because I think it’s not totally typical here in D.C. And so, I want to make sure everyone appreciates what you all are doing.
JON SCHWEPPE: So, yeah., We’re a very unique group. So, we were founded in 2009. And at the time, it was like a response to President Obama’s agenda. But we took on really weird issues back then too, the gold standard, a bunch of different things.
And over the years, we kind of found ourselves in being a socially conservative, economically populist group. And as we built out and went from being a $2 million organization to more like a $20, $25 million organization, we really found ourselves in the antitrust debates, in some of these inter-right debates over whether we should be serving working people or corporations.
And I think part of it’s probably a lot of us are Catholics here. And so, we have a commitment to Catholic social teaching that probably informs some of it. But we find ourselves on the opposite sides of leftists on a lot of social issues, and then some right‑wingers on some of the economic stuff, and certainly have made some friends on both sides because of that.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah, it’s a super, super interesting world. I don’t want to belabor this, but it sounds kind of like the new right or sort of somewhat associated with the new right. Is that fair? Or is that too broad and not fair?
JON SCHWEPPE: I think it’s accurate. I mean, I think if you’re thinking about the institutional new right in D.C., obviously, folks bring up heritage a lot because of Kevin Roberts. But you have groups like ours. You have American Moment. You have the Center for Renewing America, which is now run by Eric Tietzel, but that’s Russ Vogt’s old group. And a lot of those folks are kind of in the mindset of like what we’re talking about today.
Okay, how do we think about housing? Can we go outside of typical right-wing orthodoxy on that and think about demand side impacts and things?
And so, I certainly think for me, the political theory behind it, we’ve seen that certainly some social conservative issues are very effective with voters. They care a great deal about that. But we found that the typical right-wing stuff on economics is less effective with the new voter base that President Trump has kind of brought to the table.
And so, for us, our political argument is, hey, if you want to reach these people, yes, the social issues are important. But also, you have to be able to explain how you’re making their lives better. And so, it can’t just be cutting the corporate tax rate. It obviously has to be something a little bit more substantive.
TEDDY DOWNEY: And just to put a final pin in this, the goal is to make people’s lives better, and particularly families. And I don’t want to leave any people out of that. But you’re in particular looking at how do we create rules for a society where people can flourish and have a good education or buy a home? I mean, sort of traditional American, what people thought of as the American dream type of thing. Or am I mischaracterizing it? I’m just trying to create a picture here.
JON SCHWEPPE: No, you characterized it well. I mean, if I was giving a 15 second elevator pitch, that would basically be the argument that we’re trying to make it easier to get married and have kids. We’re trying to make it economically feasible for that to happen. And I think a lot of folks, especially in middle America right now, feel a squeeze where those things are harder to achieve, home buying included. And so, we have to turn that around if we want to save the country.
TEDDY DOWNEY: And we’re going to get to the paper. We’re going to get to the idea here, I promise you. But what is your view of why it’s so hard to buy a home, to have a family? Like, why is it so expensive? Like, what’s the sort of economic story that you think of when you think of how we’ve gone astray over the past 30, 40 years? Because obviously, we’ve covered the anti-monopoly movement more broadly. And that seems to have been a response to sort of neoliberalism and the financial collapse and sort of all these broken promises about globalization and things like that. What’s your kind of worldview when it comes to why we’re in this predicament right now?
JON SCHWEPPE: I think there’s a lot of contributors. But I’ll just tell you, Teddy, I grew up in a small town in Illinois. We had, in the 80s, all this manufacturing around us. There was a Maytag plant 40 minutes away. That got sent to Mexico, right? Walmart came to town. We had a thriving Main Street. Walmart basically wiped out the Main Street.
And so, growing up this is something for me personally that’s impacted me. You see, basically, the wealth that was allowed to exist in these towns, basically spread out. This is the globalism that a lot of right-wing populists will talk about.
And I think there’s other contributors. I mean, if you look at our monetary policy, that’s no small thing. You see the value of the dollar has shrunk dramatically over the last few decades. But all of these things kind of factor into, okay, it is much harder now to have a family of four. And people make fun of social conservatives sometimes like, oh, you want to go back to the 50s. Not from like a social standpoint where it’s like, oh, women shouldn’t work, but from a standpoint of, oh, you actually could provide for a household of four on one income. And that’s just not realistic anymore in most communities. And so, I think we have to start looking at ways to get that back.
Reshoring jobs and examining trade agreements and things like that will definitely be helpful. But it’s probably a bigger problem. I know we’re not going to talk about monetary policy today, but I think there’s some systemic things that we have to address to actually start moving in the right direction.
TEDDY DOWNEY: It’s so funny you bring up that 1950s remark. Because in so many ways, it’s such a bad faith response to say you want to go back to the 1950s and assign it to just the cultural situation. Because it’s like you said, you could have a middle-class life on one income then. And that is like a very powerful choice. That gives you a lot of choice as a family. You can move up more if you have a dual income. You can spend more time with your kids. One of the parents can spend more time with them.
There’s a lot of choice there. There’s a lot of agency, right, in that model. We had a much more competitive economy then. We had a much more robust, I think, social safety net in many respects. It’s just so interesting to see a bad faith, because I think my wife feels—we have three kids—feels similarly. Like it would be nice to have a choice. It would be nice to not feel like you have to work.
JON SCHWEPPE: That was taken away. In a lot of ways, you have these small communities and this is the American experience for so many people. Where the grandparents grew up there in this town, the parents grew up there. There was always economic opportunity. And now you have the grandkids growing up, the economic opportunity isn’t there anymore. So, now they have to leave, right? They have to flee to the cities or flee to where opportunity is.
And so, you have all these different communities dying. And there are some on the right—I think Kevin Williamson was the one most famously—when he wrote in the Atlantic, I think it was—saying basically let these communities die. But that’s not what most Americans want. Most Americans like their town. They want to be able to stay where their parents and grandparents were buried. They want to be able to build up their communities because they’ve grown up with all these people around them.
And I don’t think we should be rushing to kill that. And when you have all these, I think weird Silicon Valley people who have this idea of a libertarian utopia where, oh, you just move to where the opportunity is, it completely discards maybe a non-monetary value of community. And so, certainly as populists, as social conservatives, that’s something we’re trying to—our policy decisions should consider that as part of it.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah. Just like thinking about the Democrats’ role in this, they call them flyover states, right? Historically, right? Neoliberals, they call them flyover states. So, just the disdain, disregard, disinterest, it’s appalling.
JON SCHWEPPE: And that was the fight we had on the right too. Now, I think we still have that fight in policy. But certainly, in the rhetoric, it’s shifted. Where ten years ago, you saw all sorts of market right groups would say things like that and just be very, oh, this is efficiency. NAFTA was good because Green Line go up.
And that’s one thing I think President Trump has definitely changed for the better is, no, this is our base. Like we need to have compassion for them. We need to be thinking about these issues from where they’re coming from. And hopefully on the policy front, we can improve on that going forward.
TEDDY DOWNEY: This brings us to the paper finally. You have written a very interesting piece about home savings accounts. We’d love to get why you’re writing about this, how you came up with this idea. And if you could just walk us through it, that’d be great.
JON SCHWEPPE: Well, so really quick, to pitch APP, part of the reason they brought me back—and I worked here ten years before I worked in the FTC. So, it’s back to my old org—was that we recognize two things.
Number one, there’s a political issue. I don’t want to speculate on who’s going to win the midterms or whatever, but I think there’s plenty out there on that. You can check out the prediction markets. They’ll tell you. But I think it’s very obvious that if Republicans don’t do well in the midterms, the reason will be economics. That the American people were not happy with the economy. They see it as a K-shaped economy. And that Republicans weren’t doing enough to provide solutions to it.
And so, part of what we’re doing is we’re going to be working hard to come up with a bunch of different policy solutions that I think are actually amenable to, I guess, the Senate Republican class of the party, but are also something that would help people get ahead.
And so, we started with homeownership because homeownership is obviously top of mind. It’s hard to separate that from the actual American dream. If you’re not able to buy your own home—and now we’re seeing the average age of first homeownership is going way up—it’s hard to build equity in yourself. It’s hard to set yourself up for retirement. And so, I think that’s obviously important.
And the President has spoken a great deal on housing as well. And so, that was something, even before I came over to APP, talking with folks, like homeownership was something we wanted to address. And I want to bring you to the comments President Trump said in January. Do you remember those, Teddy?
TEDDY DOWNEY: Oh, yeah. Refresh my memory. Refresh my memory, Jon.
JON SCHWEPPE: This was criticized pretty aggressively and I’m going to defend them, okay? But he said, again, existing housing people that—I’m not going to do an impression by the way—people that own their own 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 home so that somebody that didn’t work very hard can buy a home. There’s so much talking about, oh, we’re going to drive housing prices down. I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes. And they can be assured that’s what’s going to happen.
Okay, so populists across the board freaked out at this. Reading between the lines, I think what the President was saying was that he didn’t want to do some of these YIMBY dramatically increased supply solutions. And I’m very, very sympathetic to that for two reasons.
Number one, we don’t know what the future holds on home ownership. Right now, supply feels very constrained. And obviously, we want to do whatever we can to allow people to afford homes. But it’s not going to be constrained in the future. As baby boomers die off, if we build like crazy over the next two years, three years, I think there’s a real chance that we have a housing crisis ten years, 15 years down the road.
And so, given that the President is pretty clearly not wanting to do aggressive supply expansion, what we decided at APP was, okay. Well, let’s see what we can do on the demand side that can actually help folks save for this, get ahead, without creating too much inflationary price pressure.
But I’ll just go into it really quick. So, the idea with home savings accounts, very much like health savings accounts, there are flaws to this and I’ll get into that. But you would be able to invest $10,000 pre-tax into these accounts every year, up to $10,000. They would have access to the market, other hedges against inflation. So, you could grow that money over time. And then you would only be allowed to withdraw that money for two reasons. One would be for a down payment on a house. And then the second reason would be for paying principal on a mortgage, not interest. And so, that way, if people invest $20,000 over six years in one of these accounts, and then they only put $18,000 towards a down payment, you’re not going to have to pay taxes on that extra amount. You can actually allow that extra amount to keep growing and then pay down the principal.
But one of the weird things right now is there’s this perverse incentive that existing homeowners have to never pay down their mortgage early because the rates—I know they’re higher now, but the rates tend to be lower than what could be earned in the market. And so, people don’t do that. And banks love it because they get this interest guaranteed to them over time.
And so, we thought it’d be a great idea to have the tax code essentially subsidize folks paying it down earlier. So, that way they can have that equity built in their home and then start to build out wealth over time.
TEDDY DOWNEY: My initial reaction to sort of financializing anything is do we really need to cut in the asset managers? I know a lot of my customers, I apologize. But that’s my reaction is, do you really need to cut them in on this? Yet another thing, I already got 401Ks. They’ve got plenty going for them. Do we really need to create another financial instrument here? Is that really the best way? In some respects, that is my initial reaction.
But other people make the point, well, you then get a very powerful advocate from a political standpoint when you create something like this, right? It’s a whole new investment vehicle, more money flows into the stock market. A lot of people want the stock market to go up. Asset managers want more money to get fees on, et cetera.
So, was that part of your rationale? Was like politically, this is a more salient way to get something like this done? I’m just curious how you—or was it just the success of health savings accounts?
JON SCHWEPPE: I think it’s more in line with the success. I mean, I like the idea. So, part of the problem is if you have a savings account and people sock that money away and there’s no options for how to make it grow, maybe you make it where it’s just like, let’s say a fixed interest rate. The government provides like 5 percent or something like that, like a CD. There’s just a little bit less flexibility there. And so, in terms of adoption, I think it would be more difficult.
What I like about health savings accounts—and again, the criticism on health savings accounts is fair. It’s basically a top two quintile. Maybe the third quintile really get to benefit from it. Some others are adopting it now to use it as kind of a pass through when they have major medical emergencies where I’ve even heard stories of people taking out a loan to pay medical expenses and then passing that through their HSA so they can get the tax benefit.
So, I do like the idea of folks being able to hedge against the dollar, whether it’s with stocks, bonds, gold, and to have some share in that. I just think that—maybe that’s the inner Republican in me. But it’s like, I still think that’s going to be something that folks who are thinking about, hey, I want to save for a home. They’re going to be thinking about how can I make this money work?
But to your point about the politics of it, yes. I mean, you would basically have the entire—all the interest groups would be supportive of maintaining a structure like this if they’re benefiting from it.
TEDDY DOWNEY: And I want to talk about the other side, quickly, of the housing market. Obviously, the President, I think, astutely has identified institutional home ownership as a serious problem. You mentioned that investors have in your piece—or I can’t remember if it was in the op-ed. You’ve written that institutional investors have a tax advantage over your typical homeowner, your citizen, and they can roll over—what’s that tax loophole?
JON SCHWEPPE: The 1031.
TEDDY DOWNEY: 1031. Yeah, they can just roll it. As long as they get a like-kind property, they have a tax advantage over homeowners. Why not give homeowners similar tax advantage when they’re buying a home?
Institutional ownership seems like a really, really dramatic problem. You’ve got concentrated institutional home ownership and rental. You have RealPage colluding, allegedly, allowing for rental collusion. You have this like very perverse business model now where landlords are leaving vacancies and jacking up prices because they can make more money that way. It seems like you have a broken business structure in home ownership, as much as you have a lack of money-making opportunity or problems for citizens to buy homes. It’s like you have this broken structure. What do you think about doing something on the side of fixing that structure?
JON SCHWEPPE: I love that. I think that’s something the White House is exploring. But I think certainly—well, there’s two things. There’s obviously private equity buying homes. There’s also boomers, right? So, this is actually one of the criticisms I heard from a good friend of mine about the plan. He was arguing that maybe it should be first-time home buyers only. Because it’s not like the boomers need another investment vehicle so they can outbid millennials and Gen Zers. I think that’s a very fair criticism of it and worth exploring. But yeah, I mean, I think certainly that type of thing is something that populists in Congress and at the White House are interested in.
TEDDY DOWNEY: One thing I noticed about the White House—and maybe you’re not at liberty to speculate on this—but a lot of the things the White House does, they just make it happen. Authority be damned. Or questions around the authority be damned. But I noticed that the home ownership proposal needed congressional approval from the White House. They were not as creative in their authority to execute that.
Do you think that is—am I being too cynical there? Or is there still—do you need more of really a bipartisan congressional coalition to get something like this done, something like that, along the lines of where you’re really favoring the citizen over the institutional homeowner?
JON SCHWEPPE: I’m not familiar with their thinking on that specifically, but I will say, having spoken with folks, including at the White House, I mean, there was actually a story about this a couple of weeks ago where Trump’s pollster, Fabrizio, was basically telling everybody go crazy on home ownership. This is like the number one issue. You’ve got to go do it. And that was leaked by, I assume, folks at the White House. So, they wanted people to know they’re doing it. And they’re soliciting all sorts of ideas right now. I mean, I met with them on this proposal as well.
So, I think they are interested in doing that. The question of whether executive authority, I kind of agree. Sometimes it seems like on this issue, they are willing to assert it. On other issues, they’re deferential to Congress. But I will say, maybe this is a glass half full look at it.
Home ownership, this should be something that we can do through Congress because there’s really no reason this can’t be bipartisan. I know there’s going to be disagreements about maybe how far we subsidize demand or what we do on the supply side. There’ll be these. But in terms of actually doing a home ownership bill, I could see that happening. And I can see it happening this year. It just kind of depends on how easy it is to be bipartisan, I suppose, with the politics currently.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Tough year to get any big bills through Congress. We have seen—let’s talk about—I don’t know if you’re willing to talk about Pulte at all, but there have been some interesting things coming out of the White House on housing. The White House has threatened home builders that they will get an antitrust investigation if they don’t make more housing, if they don’t ramp up supply. That seems questionable. I question whether or not they will follow through on that, but that is interesting. I’ll just name a couple other things and maybe you can just walk through what you think is interesting or not interesting.
Pulte has directed Fannie and Freddie to start buying up more mortgages to help lower interest rates, mortgage rates. There is speculation that the federal home loan banks could allow REITs to participate and free up REITs to do more, buy more securities and potentially juice the market that way. Pulte has threatened to create more competition in credit ratings with FICO to lower some of the fees.
I mean, there’s actually a lot out there. Some of it, I think, quite creative in some respects. You obviously have Warsh, who’s going to be Trump’s appointee to the Fed, who could start directing the Fed. I mean, he hasn’t done this at all yet and actually has said he wants to do tightening, quantitative tightening. But obviously, they could start buying mortgage-backed securities again. There are just a lot of levers here. Do you think the White House is willing to do that? And what do you think about just using all the tools in the toolbox? I like this proposal. It just seems like a small piece of a bigger problem, a small solution to a bigger problem.
JON SCHWEPPE: I definitely don’t think this is a silver bullet. I mean, I think it has to be multiple things. Getting the interest rates down is going to be a core component of this. Because you can build out supply. You can do all this. People are going to have a hard time taking out affording a mortgage at 6 percent.
But I will say, we’ve seen this with the President. He really likes—and he does this on a number of issues—to socialize an idea and kind of test trial ballooning it before actually committing to it. And that’s why sometimes you hear seemingly conflicting ideas coming out of the White House.
I mean, we saw that—yeah, I’ll bring this up—a couple of years ago on abortion. Within a week, he said, I think we’re considering doing a 15-week ban. And then a week later, it was like, we’re never doing any federal anything.
So, that’s just kind of the way he works. On this, there’s got to be all these multiple components. And anything that can help folks afford it on the demand side, I think you really have to look at. The supply side issue, again, I’ll just stress, I am a little cautious about a mass build-out, even though it sounds good as a short-term fix and it allows people to—it will drop prices. Because I’m just not convinced, looking at the data I’ve looked at, that it won’t lead to huge problems down the road where we just have all this empty housing and a total supply glut. So, yeah, but open to all ideas on this.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Who at the White House is spearheading the housing stuff? And who in Congress do you think is worth watching on sort of coming up with an affordability agenda on housing? Obviously, the Democrats have this—I call it very sort of a silly abundance group, sort of rehashing neoliberalism and the guys are just like deregulating the housing market as a solution. Strikes me as very unlikely to do anything meaningful or have a good result. But what’s your take on who at the White House is spearheading this? Who in Congress to keep an eye on?
JON SCHWEPPE: Vince Haley. So, Domestic Policy Council is really focused on this issue as well as their suite of affordability issues, but this seems to be number one. And in Congress, I’ve only been out for a few weeks. So, I haven’t gotten to meet with everybody yet. But every meeting I’ve taken since I got out, home ownership is the number one issue.
So, I think right now what Republicans—I can’t speak for Democrats, but what Republicans are wrestling with is what they’re willing to do and what they’re comfortable with. And so, the debate is going to be are we really just going to limit ourselves to talking about the supply side? What on the demand side can we talk about?
And that was a big part of our decision on going with the savings account model versus say direct cash payments or a first time home buyer’s credit again, or something like that, is trying to work within this political reality. I do think if Republicans get beat badly in the midterms—which I don’t know, we’ll see what happens—that might change the calculus. But right now, we still have the orthodoxy that reigns, which is pretty hostile, I think, towards a lot of demand side stuff.
And so, this is the one thing where if you talk to any Republican on the campaign trail about healthcare, they immediately go, HSA is our successful policy. Let’s build on this. And so, trying to kind of use this reflexive dependency on that policy side and then applying it to housing.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Where are the Republican reflexive problems on the demand side? Where does that come from? Is it just, oh, it costs government money? Is it like we don’t like government spending. Is it just that simple or what is it?
JON SCHWEPPE: I think there’s real fear of inflationary pressure on pricing. So, the debate over the CARES Act package a few years ago has really affected some of these House members and Senate members where—and I was an advocate for that. I thought the direct cash payments were a great idea at that time, obviously.
But there were a lot of stories about people putting it onto Robinhood and buying stock options and doing these types of things. And then inflation—I think it was not related—but inflation spiked right after that. And so, there’s, even on other issues we work on, like we’re supportive of a baby bonus direct to the parents right after they have a kid. And that type of thing is a little difficult too for that same reason.
So, that’s their mindset. Their mindset is if you do something—let’s say we did like a $7,500 first time home buyer credit or something like that—it would just cause prices to go up by that amount. And I don’t know if that’s true. But what I do feel about with the HSAs or the home SAs is that it’s likely not the case. Because this really is their money and they’re investing it into the account. They’ll enjoy some tax benefits. But it’s not like they’re getting new money right away to go buy a house with. So, the President’s point where he talked about he wanted to have—he didn’t say skin in the game—but he essentially wanted people to have skin in the game. I think this is a policy that’s more amenable towards those views than something like a credit.
TEDDY DOWNEY: I find it a little interesting that Republicans, it’s like money putting into a person’s pocket that is like obviously going to be put back into the real economy is like, that’s inflationary? But it’s like, okay, but you’re spending that money in the real economy. You know what I mean? It’s like growing the real economy. Whereas, you do quantitative easing, you’re just handing investors a bunch of money and inflating assets.
JON SCHWEPPE: Right, right.
TEDDY DOWNEY: No one says boo about that causing the type of asset inflation, right?
JON SCHWEPPE: Right.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Like, oh, the stock market’s up. That’s a great thing. I find this very troubling as a trend.
JON SCHWEPPE: It’s a relic of the Tea Party. And I know this because I was a Tea Partyer back in 2010. But it is the idea of we can’t have anything Keynesian. And so, whenever Democrats talk about multipliers or things like that—and this is true, not just of politicians out here, but even our base—they kind of hear that and they’re like, oh, that’s bullshit.
And I think, to your point, I think there’s truth. You can do it one way or the other. And I’m of the opinion, I’m a little bit more willing to subsidize demand than some of my friends. But yeah, I think you give money directly to people. They spend it in their local communities. They stimulate business. Businesses can hire more people. They can grow and expand. Seems to make a lot of sense to me.
TEDDY DOWNEY: You mentioned Walmart before as sort of destroying the fabric of your town. What is your view on what to do about the Walmart’s, Amazon’s of the world? Have you thought about Robinson-Patman Act or discriminatory pricing, anything along those lines as being a problem? Or what’s your view of like solving that Walmart problem?
JON SCHWEPPE: Well, it’s a concentration issue. The reality is that the reason Walmart was able to go into the small towns and they could afford to basically take—to have their margins be lower for a time to be able to come in, establish themselves, make themselves the number one go-to store. And then eventually outprice all of these main street establishments, right?
Like there was a store in town called Hall’s Shoes and Walmart also had shoes. And so, you can go to Hall’s Shoes and you’re going to pay like 25 percent more. And some folks on the right will say, well, this is good because you’re getting cheaper prices to consumers. It benefits everybody in the town. But there is a longer term effect of that. And it’s something we have to consider.
I’m certainly a fan of the RPA. The criticisms are very similar that you enforce it might cause prices to go up. I think there’s—speaking for myself, of course, in this capacity—it’s certainly something that we should be looking at. And also, I think Congress should be looking at it. Because if RPA is difficult to enforce, it may be something where we need to have industry specific bills to address some of the price discrimination we’re seeing.
But no, I’ve been following that issue for a while. I don’t want to claim myself as an expert or anything on it, but I think that’s something Republicans should be looking at as well.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah, I’ve thought maybe Republicans might not be okay with Robinson‑Patman Act when it comes to Walmart just because Walmart is just so kind of entrenched in Republican Party politics. But Amazon, I mean, there’s no love lost between Republicans and Amazon, I would imagine. So, that could certainly be interesting to watch going forward.
I want to touch on this broader affordability agenda. One thing I have noticed—and I want to be cautious about talking too much about the FTC, your former recent employer. But the DOJ has this Live Nation case they’re doing, which is pretty closely intertwined with an affordability agenda, since people are outraged at the high price of tickets. They just sent out CIDs in the seed industry to crack down on seed monopolies. That is a constant frustration of farmers. Anytime farmers get money, they have to just pay it out to the seed companies and other monopoly input providers for farmers.
It does seem a little bit—I don’t want to be too critical here—but that the FTC is very focused on still this aggressive anti-woke policing, anti-woke agenda. You see a lot of high-profile press releases about, oh, Apple News has censorship and it’s crowding out conservative voices and things like that. But you don’t see a lot of CIDs going out to monopolies and things like that. Am I being too myopic here? Is there a resource issue? What do you see as—and if I’m wrong, what do you see as a rest of the year affordability agenda at the antitrust agencies?
JON SCHWEPPE: Well, so I will say—and I’ve got to be careful about what is public and what’s not—but I will say, certainly affordability has been something the chairman’s been concerned about the entire time I was there and still. And on housing, we have a number of stuff that’s public. The Redfin Zillow case, that I believe was last fall that was initiated, the Greystar settlement for $24 million to stop some of their deceptive advertising practices. You have warning letters to some of the largest property managers in the country on the same issue. We have the advanced notice of proposed rulemaking on fees in the rental housing market.
So, on housing, certainly, I think that’s been a top priority for the chairman and something he’s focused on. I do think on affordability, certainly something you can walk and chew gum at the same time on some of our other consumer protection focuses. But I saw this during the Biden administration, and I think you’re going to see it her. the first year or two, I think—this is my outside perspective, not as a Democrat—President Biden really focused on a lot of base issues. And it became apparent as inflation increased and that folks were really frustrated with the economy, oh goodness, I have Lina Khan. I have Rohit Chopra. I need to get these people on stage and kind of brag about their work. And I would not be shocked if that happens even this year, but certainly in the next two with the work Chairman Ferguson is doing and then as well as DOJ antitrust.
But affordability has to be top of mind on everything. And consumer protection—I mean, antitrust obviously too—but consumer protection can do a great deal on that front. And I think it’s something that both Chair Khan and Chairman Ferguson wanted folks to know that they were focusing on.
TEDDY DOWNEY: So, you’re expecting a lot more activity between now and the rest of the year. Because I would say it’s been kind of light. I’m not saying nothing’s going on. But again, we’re talking about smaller bites of the apple here as opposed to like CIDs to big monopolies in a very sensitive industry like ag, where the farmers are getting squeezed on both sides. But you’re saying, hey, keep an eye out, despite the resource constraints, DOJ, FTC, they know that this is affordability, they know that this can be a powerful messaging tool on affordability and so we should expect more activity?
JON SCHWEPPE: Yeah, and they care about it too, right? But I think, without betraying knowledge, I think it’s fair to expect that affordability is going to be a top concern and you’ll see quite a bit out of the enforcers over the next couple of years.
TEDDY DOWNEY: I just want to quickly leave it open. If anyone has questions, you can enter them into the questions pane here or you can email us at editorial@thecapitolforum.com.
JON SCHWEPPE: Oh, Teddy, I forgot I was supposed to share this with you. So, I’m breaking it. But it’s coming out shortly. We did polling on home savings accounts.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Okay, perfect.
JON SCHWEPPE: And there’s a proposal before Congress that would establish home savings accounts similar to health savings accounts, allowing Americans to contribute pre-tax dollars to save for a home purchase or to pay down a mortgage. Would you support or oppose a federal law establishing home savings accounts? 77 percent support, 11 percent oppose. So, pretty bipartisan. Trump voters, I think supported them at 82 percent. Harris voters at 73. So, actually, this is something for Republicans. This is actually more popular with your base than with the Democrat base. So, there you go.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Very interesting. Very interesting. One thing that has come up—and certainly as an employer, I think about this—companies coming and helping their employees with down payments and things like that. Have you looked at that at all? I mean, making it easier for employees to go through their employer or get help on the home ownership front.
JON SCHWEPPE: We’ve spoken to a couple of people about that and including that as part of the way that you could get up to $10,000 is to have it come directly from your employer maybe matching or something like that. Definitely agree with that. Just because I have a personal bias here, I don’t love attaching everything to the employer. And so, that’s kind of my hesitance there, but because that’s kind of the system that we have, that may be the most prudent thing to do there.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Yeah, it doesn’t feel great to put more on the business. But that’s what we’ve seen in home ownership and retirement. You’re putting more and more onus on the citizen.
JON SCHWEPPE: But it could be a way, if you allow it, for businesses to attract talent. I know obviously that’s not that hard for Silicon Valley or for a lot of these urban areas, but it is super hard for a small town in Illinois. And so, if you’re giving them some sort of benefit to help them establish themselves here—a lot of folks on the right, and we’re not going to talk about this today, but a lot of the folks on the right are talking about, what if we did like a Homestead Act 2.0 or something like that? And I think that would have to be something tied to employers. Because people are going—maybe they don’t want to, but right now they are going—where the jobs are. So, that could be helpful.
TEDDY DOWNEY: I’ve actually, I mean, when I had to try to recruit from much better resource companies, childcare, I’ve been like, well, what if we could—is there anything that we could offer that would kind of change your mind? And actually, weirdly, childcare comes up a lot, paying for childcare or helping figure out childcare and housing. Those are the two things that like, well, I don’t have any help on this.
It speaks directly to your point there about creating a—differentiating yourself as an employer, maybe says a little bit about how we, like you said, treat families in this country, that they are so desperate, they don’t feel like they have any help on childcare or house.
JON SCHWEPPE: If you’re kind of creating this upward wage pressure by incentivizing these types of benefits, the same thing is folks will stick around with the same employer for longer periods of time. So, there are benefits to the employer. It’s not all just burdensome. But yeah, this is another reality of Republican politics that you have to consider when you’re proposing that kind of thing.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Anything else? I would love to hear what else you’re working on. So, you’re working on housing. Anything else you’re working on that we should keep an eye out the rest of the year as we get into this, deeper and deeper into the affordability agenda, from both parties?
JON SCHWEPPE: Yeah, well, we are – so, our goal—and I don’t know. It might be more like fall. But we’re trying to get a paper out in the summer that’ll have something like a dozen of these ideas across the economy and kind of pitching Congress on them. We’re actively seeding those ideas in Congress to hopefully have bills that we can point to. So, some of them we’re still obviously working on, but the idea is to touch all parts of the economy. So, homeownership, the cost of healthcare, the cost of having kids, childcare, groceries. So, we’re kind of figuring that out. This was like the one that we felt most confident about and it was a good time to release it.
But I will say the next one that we’re going to talk a great deal about is baby bonuses. And as much as I like the Trump accounts, as much as I like some of the child tax credit increase, that’s all delayed gratification. And so, I’m a pro-lifer. As a pro-lifer who wants folks who are in a crisis pregnancy to choose life, a lot of times it’s an economic question, right? It’s, oh my gosh. I’m not going to be able to afford this. I’m not going to be able to.
And so, having something like a baby bonus, whether it’s a crisis pregnancy or not, to be able to encourage mothers and say, look, you’re going to be okay. We’re going to have you’re going to be able to have this to kind of get set up. I think it’s a good idea.
And so, I know there’s been ideas in Congress before to like borrow from your child tax—Kristen Sinema had a bill that was like, borrow $5,000 from your future child tax credit to get that money immediately, which is fine. But we’re talking about if it’s $5,000, it’s only $20 billion a year. And it’s a huge investment in young people having kids who need that money.
So, from my perspective, that’s a no brainer. The President loved baby bonuses on the campaign. And even earlier in 2025, it was something that got killed in the Senate. And so, we’re going to do our best to kind of revive that and push for that in year two.
TEDDY DOWNEY: Well, Jon, I wish you the best of luck. This was an amazing conversation. You do incredible work. I think the FTC should be extremely thankful that you gave them your services. And then I’m super excited for you to be back on the outside so we can hang out more and I can learn from you. And I can’t wait to see what you do here. And I think this is an interesting place for bipartisanship, for real solutions.
Our podcast is exploring solutions to monopoly problems. I think that’s exactly what you do. When I talk to you, it sounds like that’s what you’re trying to do. That sounds like what your organization is about. So, very excited to see what you do going forward as well. So, thank you so much for doing this.
JON SCHWEPPE: Yeah, thanks for having me on, Teddy. We’ll talk soon.
TEDDY DOWNEY: All right, and this concludes the call. Thanks to everyone for joining us today. Bye-bye.
