Failing to disclose the administration’s hard line on the companies’ shareholders is disturbing for another reason. In bailing out Fannie and Freddie, the Treasury received warrants — optionlike securities that rise in value when the shares underlying them do. When investors, hoping for a housing recovery, flocked to the shares and pushed them higher, the value of the warrants increased. Fannie’s common stock now trades at $3.06 a share.

Given Treasury’s interest in a rising stock price, depriving common equity holders of future earnings was especially important for investors to know, Mr. Lowenfels said.

A spokesman for the Treasury declined to comment. Mr. Geithner did not respond to an email, and Mr. Goldstein, now a managing director at Hellman & Friedman, a private equity firm, did not return a phone call. (After the deadline for publication of this column had passed, spokespeople for the Treasury Department and Mr. Geithner offered comments.)

All of this has come to a boil because Fannie and Freddie have become so profitable. Yet because of a change in the repayment process dictated by the Treasury in 2012, the $189.5 billion debt technically remains outstanding. The profits generated by Fannie and Freddie have instead gone to the general treasury.

I have been critical of these companies, but this change in the bailout terms seems punitive, especially when considering how other bailout recipients were treated. And it has led to lawsuits against the government from Fannie and Freddie shareholders, including insurance companies, a mutual fund and a hedge fund. The plaintiffs contend that the government’s 2012 decision to take all the companies’ profit — just as it was starting to balloon — was illegal under the 2008 law that rescued them.

After all, back in 2008, the companies were not put into receivership, the equivalent of bankruptcy. Rather, they were placed under the care of a conservator — the Federal Housing Finance Agency. That conservator was supposed to put the companies “in a sound and solvent condition” and “preserve and conserve the assets and property” of each entity.

Siphoning off the entities’ profits is the opposite of conserving their assets and property, the plaintiffs contend. And they point to a 2009 Treasury memo stating that the conservatorship of Fannie and Freddie “preserves the status and claims” of preferred and common shareholders. One of those claims is surely having access to future earnings.