The Obama administration said last Monday that it would increase the pressure on banks to help troubled homeowners permanently lower mortgage payments. The government blames banks and mortgage companies for dragging their feet and, under the new guidelines, will fine them if they fail to increase the number of home owners given relief.

It also announced plans to publish a list of the worst banking offenders and to withhold cash incentives until loan modifications are made permanent. The Treasury Department also promises to assign more staff to monitor the process.

This push was the latest evidence that a $75 billion taxpayer-financed effort aimed at stemming foreclosures was struggling. Even as lenders have accelerated the pace at which they are reducing mortgage payments for borrowers, most loans modified remain in a trial stage lasting up to five months, and only a tiny fraction have been made permanent.

The Treasury Department in its statement said that more than 650,000 borrowers have received trial modifications under the program, called Making Home Affordable, and that about 375,000 borrowers were scheduled to convert to permanent modifications by the end of the year. That would represent a sharp turnaround — last month, an oversight panel created by Congress reported that fewer than 2,000 of the 500,000 loan modifications then in progress had become permanent.

Phyllis Caldwell, the chief of the Treasury’s Homeownership Preservation Office, said the administration was refocusing efforts “to ensure that borrowers and servicers know what their responsibilities are in converting trial modifications to permanent ones.”

“The banks are not doing a good enough job,” Michael S. Barr, Treasury’s assistant secretary for financial institutions, said. “Some of the firms ought to be embarrassed, and they will be. We’re seeing a failure by some of the bigger banks on execution,” Mr. Barr said. “We’re going to be quite focused and direct on particular institutions that are not doing a good job.”

From its inception early this year, the administration’s program has been dogged by persistent questions about whether it could diminish a swelling wave of foreclosures. Some economists argued that the plan was built for last year’s problem — exotic mortgages whose payments increased — and not for the current menace of soaring joblessness.

Though the program was initially proclaimed as a means of sparing three to four million households from foreclosure, “they’re going to be lucky if they save one or one-and-a-half million,” said Edward Pinto, a consultant to the real estate finance industry who served as chief credit officer to the government-backed mortgage company Fannie Mae in the late 1980s.

Some lawyers who defend homeowners against foreclosure assert that mortgage companies are merely stalling, using trial loan modifications as an opportunity to extract a few more dollars from borrowers who would otherwise make no payments. Furthermore, many think they never intend to do permanent loan modifications but rather are just playing a shell game.

James Tibbetts, Associate Broker, Windermere 206-932-2550