Freddie and Fannie

This topic isn't my forte, but I've been reading for a while (Economist, etc.) that the 2 giants were practically Federalized anyway, so the Gov't should just make it official. Krugman seems to think about the same:

The fact is that Fannie Mae was originally a government agency; it was privatized in 1968, not for any good economic reason, but to move its debt off the federal balance sheet (and Freddie was created 2 years later as a competitor.) Private ownership of Fannie and Freddie never made any real sense, and was always a crisis waiting to happen.

So what we’re really seeing now is deprivatization. It’s not something like the UK government seizing the steel mills; it’s more like firing Blackwater and giving responsibility for diplomatic security back to the Marines.