We all want Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to improve their balance sheets and stop relying on taxpayer money. We also want them to do more to clean up the mess they helped leave by offering more mortgage modification assistance.

Unfortunately, these ends seem to be mutually exclusive.

What’s clear is that the much-maligned government sponsored entities (GSEs) themselves are under fire from all sides. The problem is, the sides can’t agree on which issue to be most angry about. So we’re left being angry at everything, but solving nothing.

Deficit hawks rightfully argue that the top priority for the GSEs should be to bring them back from insolvency, to take them off the taxpayer dole. Doing this requires fiscal discipline, a laser focus on cutting costs, managing risks and increasing revenues.

Ed DeMarco, the man in charge of the FHFA – the agency that is, in turn, in charge of managing the GSEs while they lie in conservatorship – seems to agree with this side. In a recent letter to Congress, DeMarco wrote that his ultimate goal as overseer, as he saw it, included conserving assets, minimizing losses and ensuring risk was properly managed.

But even within the confines of this narrow and relatively straightforward approach, there are problems.

Part of Fannie Mae’s strategy for cleaning up its books and minimizing its risk has been to force large lenders to buy back billions of dollars worth of soured mortgage securities.

But Fannie can’t expect to continue passing off its poor decisions onto its clients, even partly, for much longer. Late last week, it was reported that Bank of America was suspending the sale of a majority of its mortgage securities to Fannie Mae, citing “ongoing differences” with the GSE over how much of the burden it should bear for investments gone bad.

The decision is bound to have a far-reaching ripple effect on Fannie’s books. It is one thing to disagree over how much responsibility one shares for poor-performing products. But it is another thing entirely to stop selling those products – high-performing products among them – to another entity altogether.

The lifeblood of the GSEs business model is to buy these securities and generate continuous, predictable revenue from them. Bank of America may have voluntarily conceded some mortgage origination marketshare in recent months, but it still remains the nation’s fourth largest mortgage originator. And when an entity that large stops selling you the product you need to generate cash flow, your cash flow can’t help but take a hit.

Which brings us to the other side of the attacks on the GSEs. All manner of locally elected officials, including our own Congressional delegation and attorney general, are clamoring for Fannie and Freddie to be more proactive in modifying loans and helping struggling homeowners.

But enacting meaningful principal writedowns and term modifications can involve substantial risk and cost the GSEs money, whether that manifests itself in lower revenues or in depleted capital reserves – or both. And given the weak state of the GSEs books, that money is hard to come by, unless it comes from taxpayers.

There is no easy solution. But we think it must start with an elimination of our own policymakers’ hypocrisy. They must either demand solvency – at the cost of helping homeowners in the short-term – or they must unify behind a public-facing policy of assistance, no matter the cost.

But they cannot have it both ways. A first step must be made, in one direction or the other, before a second step can be made, and a third, and a fourth – all the way down the long road to recovery.

The alternative is paralysis, and it’s not getting us anywhere.