Correct:
History
Fannie Mae was founded as a government agency in 1938 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal to provide liquidity to the mortgage market. For the next 30 years, Fannie Mae held a virtual monopoly on the secondary mortgage market in the United States.
In 1968, to remove the activity of Fannie Mae from the annual balance sheet of the federal budget, it was converted into a private corporation. Fannie Mae ceased to be the guarantor of government-issued mortgages, and that responsibility was transferred to the new Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae).
I don't know of any genuinely private corporations where we taxpayers must subsidize billions of dollars in losses. It is "private" only in the sense that despite being on the hook for losses, we don't get to share in any profits as well. If that doesn't seem right to you, get in line.
The plain truth is that Fannie and Freddie were quasi-public corporations. Over the weekend, the government formally removed the "quasi" part. That is a welcome first step, but only if at the end of the day, after we fix this mess at great cost to the US taxpayer, we don't repeat the mistakes that led to this mess in the first place.