By KEN SWEET

NEW YORK (AP) — The White House says it is considering backing a 50-year mortgage to help alleviate the home affordability crisis in the country. But the announcement drew immediate criticism from policymakers, social media and economists, who said a 50-year mortgage would do little to resolve other core problems in the housing market, such as a lack of supply and high interest rates.

Related Articles

Speaker Johnson shuttered the House and amassed quiet power with Trump

UK government is caught up in a feud between Trump and the BBC

Shutdown leaves a mark on an already-struggling economy, from lost paychecks to canceled flights

Top diplomats from G7 countries meet in Canada as trade tensions rise with Trump

The Supreme Court is expected to say whether full SNAP food payments can resume

Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said on X over the weekend that a 50-year mortgage would be “a complete game changer” for homebuyers. FHFA is the part of the federal government that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which buy and insure the vast majority of mortgages in the country.

The 30-year mortgage is a uniquely American financial product and the default way to buy a home since the New Deal. Politicians and policymakers at the time wanted to create a standardized mortgage that borrowers could afford and pay off during their working years, when the average lifespan for an American was 66 years old.

Lower payment

Extending the life of a mortgage to 50 years does decrease a borrower’s monthly payment.

The average selling price of a home in the U.S. was $415,200 in September, according to National Association of Realtors. Assuming a standard 10% down payment and an average interest rate of 6.17%, the monthly payment on a 30-year mortgage would be $2,288 while the payment on a 50-year mortgage would be $2,022. That’s presuming a bank would not require a higher interest rate on a 50-year mortgage, due to the longer duration of the loan.

But significantly higher interest

Because even more of the monthly payment on a 50-year mortgage would go toward interest on the loan, it would take 30 years before a borrower would accumulate $100,000 in equity, not including home price appreciation and the down payment. That’s compared to 12-13 years to accumulate $100,000 in equity when paying off a 30-year mortgage, excluding the down payment.

A borrower would pay, roughly, an additional $389,000 in interest over the life of a 50-year mortgage compared to a 30-year mortgage, according to an AP analysis.

Other analysts came to a similar conclusion.

“Extending a mortgage from 30 years to 50 years could double the (dollar) amount of interest paid by the homebuyer on a median priced home over the life of the loan and significantly slow equity accumulation,” wrote John Lovallo with UBS Securities.

Broader housing issues

A 50-year mortgage does nothing to solve one critical issue when it comes to housing affordability — the lack of supply of homes. States like California and cities like New York have recently passed legislation or made regulatory changes to allow builders to build homes faster with less regulatory red tape.

There’s also the raw cost of homebuilding in the country. Products such as steel, lumber, concrete, copper and plastics that go into home construction are now subject to tariffs under President Trump. Further, many construction jobs were being done by undocumented workers, particularly in the Southwest, where deportations are impacting the ability for homebuilders to find enough labor to build homes.

“Many of the big things that would address supply right now are going in the wrong direction,” said Mike Konczal, senior director of policy and research at the Economic Security Project.”

Pulte said on X that the introduction of a 50-year mortgage was just a “potential weapon,” among other solutions the White House has considered to combat high housing prices.

American don’t live long enough

The average age of a first-time homebuyer has been creeping up for years and is now roughly 40 years of age. A 50-year mortgage would be difficult to underwrite for a bank for a 40-year-old first-time homebuyer, who would be 90 years old by the time that home is paid off. The average life expectancy of an American is now roughly 79 years, meaning there’s 11 years of life expectancy not covered in a 50-year loan.

“It’s typically not a goal of policymakers to pass on mortgage debt to a borrowers’ children,” Konczal said.

Others have tried longer loans

Other parts of the financial system have extended loan terms, to mixed results. The seven-year auto loan has become increasingly common as car prices have risen and Americans keep their cars longer. Despite longer loan terms, auto loan delinquencies have been rising, and the average price of a new car is now $49,740 compared to a price of $38,948 for a new vehicle five years ago.

Student loans were originally designed to be paid off in 10 years, and now there are multiple payment options that extend repayment out to 20 years.

Economists pointed out that a 50-year mortgage may do the opposite of helping with home affordability: by causing home price inflation by introducing more potential buyers into a market struggling with supply.

Trump downplays idea

After significant criticism, President Trump seemed less enthused about the 50-year mortgage. When asked by Laura Ingraham of Fox News about the idea, President Trump said it “might help a little bit” but seemed to brush it off.

Under the Dodd-Frank Act, the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac cannot insure a mortgage that is longer than 30 years, so any 50-year mortgages issued before Congress amends the law would be considered a “non-qualifying mortgage” and would be more difficult to sell to investors. Congress would have to amend U.S. financial laws in multiple places to allow 50-year mortgage, and there seems to be little appetite for Congress to take this on immediately.

By SAM McNEIL, Associated Press

He waited for his brother-in-law to cross the front line smuggling documents stolen from the Syrian dictatorship’s archives. Detection could mean dismemberment or death, but they were committed to exposing the industrial-scale violence used to keep President Bashar Assad in power.

Ussama Uthman, now 59, was building a vast record of the brutality — photographs that showed Assad’s government was engaging in systematic torture and extrajudicial killings.

Now, safely in exile in France and with Assad having fallen in a surprise rebel offensive last year, Uthman is sharing how he, his wife and her brother teamed up to smuggle evidence of the horrific crimes out from under Syria’s infamous surveillance apparatus as war tore the country apart.

The photos of broken bodies and torture sites — records were apparently kept to show orders were being followed — began appearing online in 2014. They spurred U.S. sanctions, and are being used to prosecute suspected war crimes and help Syrians find out what happened to family members who disappeared.

“We have hundreds of thousands of mothers waiting for news of their loved ones,” said Uthman.

During a recent interview in northern France — The Associated Press agreed to withhold the exact location for security reasons — the only time Uthman’s voice broke was when he recounted sending a woman photos of a brutalized body and asking if she recognized her son.

“I send her five snapshots of her son’s body, torn under Bashar Assad’s whips, and she rejoices. She says, ‘Thank God, I have confirmed that he is dead,’” he recalled. “This sadness should have kept our flags at half-staff in Syria for years.”

Family secrets, risks and duty

With the Arab Spring sweeping through the Middle East in 2011, protests in the southern city of Daraa inspired demonstrations throughout Syria. The government responded with force, but rather than crushing the demonstrations, the brutality sparked a civil war that spurred foreign intervention and pitted a patchwork of rebel groups against the armor and air power of the military and Assad’s allies.

When news broke that first year of a massacre in Hama, Uthman, a construction engineer from the Damascus suburb of al-Tall, swore he’d help topple Assad. He didn’t know how until he got a call from his wife’s brother Farid al-Mazhan, a military police officer who asked him to meet in person — electronic communications were too risky.

Al-Mazhan showed Uthman gory images taken by photographers in the military forensic pathology department that he helped run. He said he could access more.

The two launched a secret operation that would eventually smuggle more than 53,000 photographs out of Syria showing evidence of torture, disease and starvation in the country’s lockups.

The operation was incredibly dangerous but straightforward.

As an officer, Al-Mazhan could pass government-run checkpoints; his connections in the rebel-held town where he lived and eventually Uthman’s secret coordination with rebels enabled him to cross checkpoints staffed by their fighters.

He would then secretly pass CDs, hard drives and USB sticks containing photos and other documents to Uthman. He also slipped them to his sister, Khawla al-Mazhan, who is married to Uthman. She was the first to suggest using the photos to try to topple Assad.

“Why don’t we use these images to bring down the regime?” Uthman recalled her saying.

Uthman adopted the nom de guerre Sami. Farid al-Mazhan took Caesar. Their operation would become known as the Caesar Files.

Justice for Syria, from exile

Deciding to escape Syria — an estimated 6 million people fled during the war — the team uploaded 55 gigabytes of photos and documents dating from May 2011 to August 2014 to a foreign server. They then began furtively moving their extended families to neighboring countries. Diplomats eventually helped Uthman’s family settle in France in 2014.

Once safely out of Syria, they began publishing the material, sparking immediate and widespread condemnation of Assad.

As families scoured the ghastly archive for signs of what happened to their loved ones, the team gave copies to European prosecutors. Authorities in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland have arrested or initiated legal proceedings against former Syrian officials accused of torture and killings.

The release of the files marked “a key point in Syria’s history,” said Kholoud Helmi, co-founder of the independent Syrian news site Enab Baladi. Both the international community and Syrians were faced with “striking proof” of the Assad government’s crimes.

“Almost nobody believed us — or thought we were exaggerating,” said Helmi, who fled during the war.

The Caesar Files team are heroes, said Lina Chawaf, editor-in-chief of Radio Rozana, an independent Syrian media outlet.

“You know the price that you will pay, but it will cost all of your family,” said Chawaf, who also fled Syria.

Hoping to plug the leak, Syrian authorities tightened their grip on their archive. Gradually, the team reorganized and grew to roughly 60 members both inside and outside of Syria. They built a second tranche of evidence, the Atlas Files, from 2014 until 2024.

Late last year, as they were starting to organize this new catalog — it’s nearly three times the size of the first — startling news broke: Rebels had seized Syria’s second-biggest city, Aleppo.

Accountability under a new regime

Within 10 days, rebel forces sprinted across government-held territory to take Damascus, forcing Assad to flee to Russia and ending his family’s nearly 54-year rule.

The sudden power vacuum bred chaos, with rebels flinging open the doors of the country’s most feared prisons.

Team members still in Syria and families of the missing rushed to the sites in search of information — more than 130,000 Syrians disappeared during the war, according to international bodies.

Helmi, of the Enab Baladi news site, considers her family lucky to have found proof of her brother Ahmad’s execution.

“They killed him 27 days after he was detained, and we’ve been waiting for him for 13 years,” said Helmi, who thinks the new government of President Ahmad al-Sharaa, a former rebel leader, hasn’t done enough to help families.

Uthman went further, saying so much evidence was lost in the immediate aftermath of Assad’s ouster that it was akin to the new authorities “destroying evidence, tampering with the crime scene.”

Related Articles

The specter of new conflict haunts memorials around World War I’s end

UK government is caught up in a feud between Trump and the BBC

Thieves steal Roman statues from Syria’s national museum

Iraqis vote in a parliamentary election marked by tight security and a major political boycott

Tens of thousands attend funeral of Israeli soldier whose remains were held in Gaza for 11 years

Documents lay scattered on rainy streets, psychologically shattered prisoners wandered out of broken jails, and wild dogs chewed on bones in mass graves, he said.

The government — which hopes the U.S. will permanently lift the sanctions imposed for the abuses exposed by the Caesar Files — says it is doing all it can to reckon with Assad’s bloody legacy. During Al-Sharaa’s visit to Washington on Monday, the Treasury announced a waiver of the sanctions had been renewed for another six months.

In a news conference last week in Damascus, Reda al-Jalakhi, who heads the government’s National Commission for the Missing, acknowledged that “in the first two days of the liberation, there was some chaos and a lot of documents were lost.”

But he said the authorities quickly took control of Assad’s old lockups and is preserving the remaining evidence. He thanked the Caesar Files team for providing some documentation to the commission, but he didn’t signal any plans for ongoing cooperation, saying the government would build a centralized database to find the missing.

With a defiant twinkle in his eyes, Uthman said his team’s work will continue to fight any impunity in Syria as fresh sectarian violence bloodies the country. The team dreams that one day Assad might face their evidence at trial.

Associated Press reporter Ghaith Alsayed in Damascus contributed to this report.

By HANNAH SCHOENBAUM, Associated Press

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A Utah judge on Monday rejected a new congressional map drawn by Republican lawmakers and adopted an alternate proposal creating a Democratic-leaning district ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Related Articles

Speaker Johnson shuttered the House and amassed quiet power with Trump

UK government is caught up in a feud between Trump and the BBC

Shutdown leaves a mark on an already-struggling economy, from lost paychecks to canceled flights

Top diplomats from G7 countries meet in Canada as trade tensions rise with Trump

The Supreme Court is expected to say whether full SNAP food payments can resume

Republicans hold all four of Utah’s U.S. House seats and had advanced a map poised to protect them.

Judge Dianna Gibson ruled just before a midnight deadline that the Legislature’s map “unduly favors Republicans and disfavors Democrats.”

She had ordered lawmakers to draw a map that complies with standards established by voters to ensure districts don’t deliberately favor a party, a practice known as gerrymandering. If they failed, Gibson warned she may consider other maps submitted by plaintiffs in the lawsuit that led her to throw out Utah’s existing map.

Gibson ultimately selected a map drawn by plaintiffs, the League of Women Voters of Utah and Mormon Women for Ethical Government. It keeps Salt Lake County almost entirely within one district, instead of dividing the heavily Democratic population center among all four districts, as was the case previously.

The judge’s ruling throws a curveball for Republicans in a state where they expected a clean sweep as they work to add winnable seats elsewhere. Nationally, Democrats need to net three U.S. House seats next year to wrest control of the chamber from the GOP, which is trying to buck a historic pattern of the president’s party losing seats in the midterms.

The newly approved map gives Democrats a much stronger chance to flip a seat. The state last had a Democrat in Congress in early 2021.

“This is a win for every Utahn,” state House and Senate Democrats said in a joint statement. “We took an oath to serve the people of Utah, and fair representation is the truest measure of that promise.”

The state’s top election official said Monday was the last possible date to enact a new congressional map so county clerks would have enough time to prepare for candidate filings for the 2026 midterms. Gibson said in her ruling that she is obligated to ensure a lawful map was in place by the deadline.

Republicans have argued Gibson does not have legal authority to enact a map that wasn’t approved by the Legislature. State Rep. Matt MacPherson called the ruling a “gross abuse of power” and said he has opened a bill to pursue impeachment against Gibson.

In August, Gibson struck down the Utah congressional map adopted after the 2020 census because the Legislature had circumvented anti-gerrymandering standards passed by voters.

The ruling thrust Utah into a national redistricting battle as President Donald Trump urged other Republican-led states to take up mid-decade redistricting to try to help the GOP retain control of the House in 2026. Some Democratic states are considering new maps of their own, with California voters approving a map last week that gives Democrats a shot at winning five more seats. Republicans are still ahead in the redistricting fight.

Redistricting typically occurs once a decade after a census. There are no federal restrictions to redrawing districts mid-decade, but some states — more led by Democrats than Republicans — set their own limitations. The Utah ruling gives an unexpected boost to Democrats, who have fewer opportunities to gain seats through redistricting.

If Gibson had instead approved the map drawn by lawmakers, all four districts would still lean Republican but two would have become slightly competitive for Democrats. Their proposal gambled on Republicans’ ability to protect all four seats under much slimmer margins rather than create a single-left leaning district.

By LISA MASCARO, AP Congressional Correspondent

WASHINGTON (AP) — After refusing to convene the U.S. House during the government shutdown, Speaker Mike Johnson is recalling lawmakers back into session — and facing an avalanche of pent-up legislative demands from those who have largely been sidelined from governing.

Related Articles

UK government is caught up in a feud between Trump and the BBC

Shutdown leaves a mark on an already-struggling economy, from lost paychecks to canceled flights

Top diplomats from G7 countries meet in Canada as trade tensions rise with Trump

The Supreme Court is expected to say whether full SNAP food payments can resume

Trump pardons man who took brief detour as he ran up and down Wyoming’s Grand Teton in record time

Hundreds of representatives are preparing to return Wednesday to Washington after a nearly eight-week absence, carrying a torrent of ideas, proposals and frustrations over work that has stalled when the Republican speaker shuttered the House doors nearly two months ago.

First will be a vote to reopen the government. But that’s just the start. With efforts to release the Jeffrey Epstein files and the swearing in of Arizona’s Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, the unfinished business will pose a fresh test to Johnson’s grip on power and put a renewed focus on his leadership.

“It’s extraordinary,” said Matthew Green, a professor at the politics department at The Catholic University of America.

“What Speaker Johnson and Republicans are doing, you have to go back decades to find an example where the House — either chamber — decided not to meet.”

Gaveling in after two months gone

When the House gavels back into session, it will close this remarkable chapter of Johnson’s tenure when he showed himself to be a leader who is quietly, but brazenly, willing to upend institutional norms in pursuit of his broader strategy, even at the risk of diminishing the House itself.

Rather than use the immense powers of the speaker’s office to forcefully steer the debate in Congress, as a coequal branch of the government on par with the executive and the courts, Johnson simply closed up shop — allowing the House to become unusually deferential, particularly to President Donald Trump.

Over these past weeks, the chamber has sidestepped its basic responsibilities, from passing routine legislation to conducting oversight. The silencing of the speaker’s gavel has been both unusual and surprising in a system of government where the founders envisioned the branches would vigorously protect their institutional prerogatives.

“You can see it is pretty empty around here,” Johnson, R-La., said on day three of the shutdown, tour groups no longer crowding the halls.

“When Congress decides to turn off the lights, it shifts the authority to the executive branch. That is how it works,” he said, blaming Democrats, with their fight over health care funds, for the closures.

An empty House as a political strategy

The speaker has defended his decision to shutter the House during what’s now the longest government shutdown in U.S. history. He argued that the chamber, under the GOP majority, had already done its job passing a stopgap funding bill in September. It would be up to the Senate to act, he said.

When the Senate failed over and over to advance the House bill, more than a dozen times, he refused to enter talks with the other leaders on a compromise. Johnson also encouraged Trump to cancel an initial sit-down with the Democratic leaders Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries to avoid a broader negotiation while the government was still closed.

Instead, the speaker, whose job is outlined in the Constitution, second in line of succession to the presidency, held held almost daily press conferences on his side of the Capitol, a weekly conference call with GOP lawmakers, and private talks with Trump. He joined the president for Sunday’s NFL Washington Commanders game as the Senate was slogging through a weekend session.

“People say, why aren’t you negotiating with Schumer and Jeffries? I quite literally have nothing to negotiate,” Johnson said at one point.

“As I’ve said time and time again, I don’t have anything to negotiate with,” he said on day 13 of the shutdown. “We did our job. We had that vote.”

And besides he said of the GOP lawmakers, “They are doing some of their best work in the district, helping their constituents navigate this crisis.”

Accidental speaker delivers for Trump

In many ways, Johnson has become a surprisingly effective leader, an accidental speaker who was elected to the job by his colleagues after all others failed to win it. He has now lasted more than two years, longer than many once envisioned.

This year, with Trump’s return to the White House, the speaker has commandeered his slim GOP majority and passed legislation including the president’s so-called “one big beautiful bill” of tax breaks and spending reductions that became law this summer.

Johnson’s shutdown strategy also largely achieved his goal, forcing Senate Democrats to break ranks and approve the funds to reopen government without the extension of health care subsidies they were demanding to help ease the sticker shock of rising insurance premium costs with the Affordable Care Act.

Johnson’s approach is seen as one that manages up — he stays close to Trump and says they speak often — and also hammers down, imposing a rigid control over the day-to-day schedule of the House, and its lawmakers.

Amassing quiet power

Under a House rules change this year, Johnson was able to keep the chamber shuttered indefinitely on his own, without the usual required vote. This year his leadership team has allowed fewer opportunities for amendments on legislation, according to a recent tally. Other changes have curtailed the House’s ability to provide a robust check on the executive branch over Trump’s tariffs and use of war powers.

Johnson’s refusal to swear-in Grijalva is a remarkable flex of the speaker’s power, leading to comparisons with Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision not to consider President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, said David Rapallo, an associate professor and director of the Federal Legislation Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. Arizona has sued to seat her.

Marc Short, who headed up the White House’s legislative affairs office during the first Trump administration, said of Johnson, “It’s impressive how he’s held the conference together.”

But said Short, “The legislative branch has abdicated a lot of responsibility to the executive under his watch.”

Tough decisions ahead for the Speaker

As lawmakers make their way back to Washington, the speaker’s power will be tested again as they consider the package to reopen government.

Republicans are certain to have complaints about the bill, which funds much of the federal government through Jan. 30 and keeps certain programs including agriculture, military construction and veterans affairs running through September.

But with House Democratic leaders rejecting the package for having failed to address the health care subsidies, it will be up to Johnson to muscle it through with mostly GOP lawmakers — with hardly any room for defections in the chamber that’s narrowly split.

Jeffries, who has criticized House Republicans for what he called an extended vacation, said, “They’re not going to be able to hide this week when they return.”