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A bipartisan group of U.S. senators wants federal housing agencies to extend a moratorium on foreclosures in Puerto Rico into 2019 after the devastation on the island and a big surge in mortgage delinquencies, the New York Times reported. The four senators said in a letter on Friday that a longer moratorium was needed because large swaths of Puerto Rico remained without electricity in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and because many residents were still trying repair the damage to their homes. The senators noted that homeowners needed more time to “pick up the pieces of their lives” than was allotted under the current grace period, which expires in March. They want the moratorium extended until March 2019, along with a commitment that lenders will not seek to collect any mortgage payments in that period. The four senators — Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) — was sent to officials at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. About one-third of the island’s 425,000 homeowners are behind on their mortgage payments to banks and Wall Street firms that previously bought up distressed mortgages. And some 90,000 of those borrowers became delinquent as a consequence of Hurricane Maria, according to the data firm Black Knight.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) said yesterday that the agency will review and reconsider aspects of two rules issued by its former directer, Richard Cordray, The Hill reported. Under acting Director Mick Mulvaney, the CFPB announced plans to revise rules issued by Cordray regarding mortgage data collection and prepaid credit cards. One of the revisions: The bureau will no longer assess penalties against mortgage lenders and banks for errors collected in data next year that is subject to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA). The bureau also won't ask for lenders to resubmit such data if errors aren't "material" to the information provided. The CFPB also said it would begin the process of making a rule to revise parts of the CFPB’s 2015 rule regarding the HMDA. The bureau singled out institutional and transactional coverage tests, discretionary data points and lending-activity criteria that determine whether institutions are required to report mortgage data.

Lawmakers in both parties and the Trump administration are negotiating overhauls of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — critical to home mortgages but in government conservatorship since the financial crisis — that could keep them at the center of the U.S. mortgage market for years to come, abandoning long-stalled proposals to wind them down, the Wall Street Journal reported. Bipartisan Senate legislation set to be introduced in early 2018 marks the clearest sign of this reversal and shows how the companies, entering their 10th year under federal control, have proven too risky to attempt replacing. The housing market has seen strong demand in recent years, driven in part by steady access for many Americans to 4 percent or lower 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, thanks in part to a government backstop of the companies.