Democrats are pressing hard to include a multibillion-dollar bailout for faltering automakers, too - over administration objections - even as federal officials acknowledged that banks and financial institutions were as unwilling as ever to lend to consumers.

Unimpressed by any of the talk on Wednesday, Wall Street dove ever lower, with all major indexes off more than 4 percent.

''The facts changed and the situation worsened,'' said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, explaining the administration's switch from its original plan to help financial institutions by buying up troubled assets, primarily securities backed by bad home loans.

With barely two months left before President Bush leaves office, Paulson is hoping to underwrite a gigantic new lending program that would be run by the Federal Reserve and aimed at consumer loans for cars, credit cards and possibly home mortgages. Treasury officials want to invest about $50 billion from the bailout fund into a new loan facility that could in turn finance as much as $1 trillion in consumer lending.

Despite its new flexibility, the administration remained opposed to using the rescue fund to bail out the ailing auto industry or to provide guarantees for home loans, an idea that supporters contend offers the greatest hope for helping legions of Americans who are facing foreclosure.

Congressional Democrats felt otherwise on autos, and strongly. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were pressing for quick passage of a major package for carmakers during a postelection session that begins next Tuesday, and one key House Democrat was putting together legislation that would send $25 billion in emergency loans to the beleaguered industry in exchange for a government ownership stake in the Big Three car companies.

Paulson said the administration had decided that the original focus of the bailout program - the purchase of distressed mortgage-backed securities and other troubled assets on the books of banks - would not be employed. He said setting up such a program was taking too much time.

Not all the news was bad, Paulson suggested. He said the rescue program approved by Congress a month ago has already had an impact in dealing with the most severe financial crisis in decades, a credit squeeze that is threatening to push the country into a deep and prolonged recession.