President Donald Trump has promised to address housing-market dysfunction and a lack of affordability in 2026. While we don’t know what the White House has planned, previous talk has included a (much criticized) suggestion for 50-year mortgages and exhortations to builders to do their duty and build more housing.

It’s certainly time for the federal government to consider ways of improving market functioning after three years of low existing-home sales, fairly modest progress on affordability, and homebuilders accepting elevated levels of buyer incentives and, in many cases, low profit margins to sell homes. Fortunately, there’s targeted fiscal actions, available at a limited cost to taxpayers, that the White House can consider to speed up the normalization in conditions that’s sluggishly underway.