I think there is no hypothesis. There is a commitment to creating a narrative that proves the predetermined "problem" and the intended outcome.
My theory is that all these narratives started when the Democrats gained control of the House in 2018, though had probably been in discussion since the Obama years. I listened to one webinar during about the first week of that new congress and one of the participants indicated that the Maxine Watters committee had been working on this issue and were ready to have hearings beginning immediately. During the following year, Andrew Perry's fictional study was written. If there were any transparency, I would bet that taxpayers funded a portion of that hit piece, and Perry testified before Congress. The southern socialist's work came out at about the same time, and their funding has commonly been through government grants. By early 2020, they were on the testimony circuit, and when the Democrats gained control of the White House and both congressional bodies, all the pieces were in place to act before they lost that control.
I think Freddie was the vehicle to cement the narrative...they did just enough to find a sliver of a potential problem, enough to crow about finding the problem and setting out to fix it, even though research that had existed for most of a decade before the Freddie "research" seemed to make a pretty good case for why the noted differences could occur without the involvement of crooked appraisers. You will notice that no third research note has been offered. Nor has there been any reported effort toward analyzing specific appraisals to determine if any inappropriate actions have been taken by individual appraisers.
What we have to date is a new target for appraisers to focus on. If you hit the contract price in every purchase appraisal you do, you cannot be branded with the bias tag, given that the only measure of bias that anyone has proposed is Freddie's "appraisal gap." And, the chief appraiser at Freddie publicly offered the solution to ensuring that outcome...make a market conditions adjustment! Of course, when you are that stupid, short-sighted, and crooked, you fail to conceive of how that will look when prices are declining!
