"Last summer, as President Obama's premier plan to save millions of Americans from foreclosure foundered, the administration tossed a new life preserver to homeowners and unveiled a $1 billion program to offer loans to help the jobless pay their mortgages until they could find work again; it was supposed to take effect before the end of the year, but as of today, the program has yet to accept any applications," according to a front-page article in The New York Times today by Michael Powell and Andrew Martin.

"That could be an epitaph for the administration's broader foreclosure prevention effort, as tens of billions of dollars remain unspent and hundreds of thousands of homeowners have been rejected. Now the existence of the main program, the Home Assistance Modification Program, is in doubt," the article continued.

The Republican-controlled House voted on last night to kill the foreclosure relief program, but the Democratic-controlled Senate will pursue a rescue, the article said, but added that "Democrats, too, consider the program badly flawed."

The effort, the article continued, "has failed to stanch a wave of foreclosures and a decline in home prices, which have fallen for six consecutive months and are now just barely above their recession low, according to a key index updated on Tuesday. All of this threatens the fragile economy, which is also being buffeted by foreign crises."

The article said that Representative Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California, declared that "The banking industry fought us tooth and nail, and we ended up with a program that is failing homeowners," adding that "The administration doesn't give us real enforcement or answers; we just get the old yokey-doke."

There were 225,000 foreclosure filings in February, according to RealtyTrac," the article said, adding that "about 145,000 homeowners are in trial modifications under the Obama program."

"An examination of federal documents and lawsuits, and interviews with legislators, state attorneys general, housing counselors, homeowners and regulators," the article maintained, "reveal a federal mortgage modification program crippled by weak oversight, conflicts of interest, mind-numbing complexity and poor performance by many participating banks."

The article noted that "Congress set aside $50 billion for foreclosure prevention, amid administration projections that three million to four million homeowners would benefit from modifications. So far, the Treasury Department, which oversees the program, has spent slightly more than $1 billion, and just 607,000 homeowners have received permanent loan modifications (of those, 11 percent have defaulted)."

The article also said that "the companies that service mortgages, typically large banks, continually lose homeowner paperwork and incorrectly tell homeowners that they must be delinquent to qualify" and that "Treasury officials have not fined any servicers, and the government-controlled company hired by the Treasury to oversee the program has expressed reluctance to crack down on banks."

"In the winter of 2009, the Obama administration's urgency to address foreclosures was palpable. Hundreds of thousands of families had lost homes, and in towns from Florida to California to Nevada, foreclosure slums took root, marked by boarded-up homes and uncut grass," the article said, adding that on Feb. 28, 2009, President Obama announced the housing assistance program in which banks and mortgage brokers could extend mortgages, or cut the amount of the loan or the interest rate and a monthly payment could not exceed 31 percent of gross income and, in return, the administration offered payments to banks and servicers.

"It will give millions of families resigned to financial ruin a chance to rebuild," Mr. Obama said. "By bringing down the foreclosure rate, it will help shore up housing prices for everyone."

None of those hopes came to pass, the article said.