The White House described the changes as part of a broader plan to boost the economy through measures that do not require legislative action, reflecting a pragmatic recognition that Congress is deadlocked on economic issues, and a political effort to blame Republicans for the standoff.
 

“We have far too many Americans who have paid their bills and done everything right on their mortgages and yet they’re still stuck with interest rates of 6 or 7 percent,” said Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development. The existing program, he said, “has not reached the scale that we had hoped and the scale that it needs to reach.”

The broader refinancing program, which will still take months to implement, will let people qualify for new loans no matter how far the value of their homes have declined, and without regard to their financial situations so long as they have made at least six consecutive monthly mortgage payments. The plan also will reduce the fees that borrowers must pay, for example by dispensing with the need for an appraisal in many cases and by automatically transferring mortgage insurance to the new loan.
 

The plan also seeks to encourage banks and mortgage companies to participate by eliminating their legal responsibility for problems with the original loan, a significant financial benefit in many cases.
 

But the government maintained the narrow focus of the original program, significantly limiting the potential impact of the changes. The refinancing offer only applies to loans in the portfolios of the government-owned mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It only applies to loans that they acquired before May 31, 2009. And it only applies to loans worth more than 80 percent of the value of the home. In other words, it does not matter how deeply a homeowner is underwater — the loan can be worth twice the value of the home — but owners with more equity are not eligible.
 

The government estimates the revised program will allow perhaps 1 million homeowners to refinance — less than it once projected would benefit from the original program.

The changes announced Monday address a series of problems that lenders and outside experts warned from the outset would undermine the original program. In particular, the high cost of refinancing proved a formidable barrier to many homeowners struggling to pay their bills. So did the strict income requirements, which in many cases created the odd situation that a person who had never fallen behind on their mortgage payments was unable to qualify for a loan with a lower monthly payment.

The terms of the program are set by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, an independent agency that administers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and that had resisted calls to broaden the program because it said its primary responsibility was to staunch the losses at the two companies. The agency said Monday that it had agreed to make the changes because doing so would contribute to that goal.
 

“Our goal in pursuing these changes is to create refinancing opportunities for these borrowers, while reducing risk for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and bringing a measure of stability to housing markets,” said the agency’s acting director, Edward J. DeMarco.
 

Some of the most important changes concern technical issues deep inside the machinery of the mortgage process. For example, borrowers who took two mortgage loans, and cannot afford to repay the second loan, cannot refinance the first loan without the permission of the second lender. The government has now negotiated a blanket grant of permission from many lenders.
 

Gene Sperling, director of the president’s National Economic Council, said the mortgage industry had shown a new willingness to facilitate refinancing, making the broader program possible.
 

“What has changed and made this more viable and led the president to push all of us even harder was that there was a growing awareness among all the stakeholders” that this problem needed to be addressed, Mr. Sperling said on a conference call Monday to discuss the announcement from the federal housing agency.

By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM
New York Times.