Is Tim Geithner preparing a redo of subprime mortgages?

Subprime Scandal: You can't talk about the housing crisis or reforms without talking about the affordable-housing goals HUD slapped on Fannie and Freddie. That is, unless you're Tim Geithner.

The Treasury secretary hosted a summit Tuesday to discuss redesigning the mortgage-finance system — 75% of which is still controlled by Fannie and Freddie, which are still bleeding billions at taxpayer expense.

Geithner vowed to fundamentally "change" the failed government-sponsored mortgage giants. Yet, suspiciously, he didn't offer how. Nor did he explain why they lowered their underwriting standards and collapsed under the weight of subprime loans and securities. So here's a refresher:

• In 1996, as part of Clinton housing policy, HUD required that 42% of Fannie's and Freddie's mortgage financing go to "underserved" borrowers with unproven or damaged credit.

• To help them meet that goal, HUD, their regulator, authorized them to relax their lending criteria.

• HUD also authorized them to buy subprime securities that included loans to uncreditworthy borrowers.

• Unhappy with the results — despite Fannie and Freddie committing trillions in risky low-income loans — HUD in 2000 raised its affordable-housing target again, this time to 50%.

• By 2008, HUD's target had topped out at 56%. And Fannie and Freddie had drowned in a toxic soup of bad subprime paper.

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan insists that affordable-housing goals aren't to blame. "We should be careful not to learn the wrong lesson from this experience," he said, "and sacrifice an important feature of the current system: wide access to mortgage credit."

This is revisionist history. Fannie and Freddie e-mails confirm that executives then were under huge pressure to meet "HUD goals."

But as Orwell warned, whoever controls the present controls the past. And right now, the people who pushed Fannie and Freddie — along with our entire financial system — off the cliff in the name of "affordable housing" are running the show.

Just look at some of the experts Geithner invited to his Potemkin summit. Like ex-Clinton aide Ellen Seidman, who became head of the Office of Thrift Supervision. She aggressively enforced Clinton's beefed-up Community Reinvestment Act, which codified the "flexible" underwriting that Fannie and Freddie adopted.

Seidman argued that Fannie's and Freddie's support for "low-income and minority communities" — especially now amid a wave of foreclosures — is "absolutely critical." She wants government to take an even larger role in pushing housing for "underserved markets."