A lawsuit accusing the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) of nationality and age-based employment discrimination was filed Monday, July 21 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
Milton C. Johns of Executive Law Partners, PLLC filed the complaint, case #1:25-cv-02346, on behalf of more than 60 former Fannie Mae employees. Many of the employees had been with Fannie Mae a decade or longer — one listed in the complaint was with the company for 22 years, and the group worked across a variety of departments.
The employees are all U.S. citizens of Indian nationality, and all but one of the plaintiffs note in the lawsuit they are over age 40. Most list themselves in the suit as speaking Telugu, one of a group of languages primarily spoken in southern India, Sri Lanka, and parts of Pakistan.
The lawsuit claims Fannie Mae “summarily fired” the employees on April 3, 2025 “without notice, warning, or due process.” According to the complaint, the employees were told via an email the day before not to show up at work, and instead to attend a Microsoft Teams call, on which they were terminated.
“Plaintiffs joined the Teams call along with what they believe were at least 80 other people,” the complaint states, and everyone on the call was told they were being fired “with cause for violating Fannie Mae’s Charitable Giving program for fraud.”
Again referencing age, the lawsuit claims the plaintiffs have since learned that, of everyone on this purported call, “all but a handful were over the age of 40 and most over the age of 50.”
The organizations to which these former employees had donated were approved by Fannie Mae, the lawsuit alleges, and were made available for matching donations through a Fannie Mae employee portal. Further, the organizations all are dedicated to Indian cultural and charitable endeavors, with many specifically supporting Telugu speakers.
The plaintiffs claim they asked Fannie Mae to reconsider their termination, and that “to this day, Fannie Mae has still provided no evidence to support their claims of fraud against any of Plaintiffs, jointly or severally.”
“In response to a request for reconsideration subsequently made by Plaintiffs, Fannie Mae said that Plaintiffs had made gifts that they knew or should have known violated their policy, or that they knew that other employees had made gifts that Plaintiffs knew or should have known violated their policy,” the complaint states. “No explanation of individual conduct was ever given to any Plaintiff.”
None of the donations Fannie Mae referenced was more than $5,000, Executive Law Partners noted in its release, and many of the donations date back as far as 2018. Some of the plaintiffs made a single donation, while others made more.
Fannie Mae has not yet responded to the complaint, and also has not responded to a request for comment.
If is unclear if the alleged termination incident described in this July 21 lawsuit is related to an announcement Fannie Mae made on April 8, 2025 that it had fired more than 100 of its workers for unethical conduct — including facilitating fraud — after conducting an internal investigation.
