An emergency-loan program intended to help homeowners avoid foreclosure nationwide is likely to end up at best making half as many loans as Congress budgeted for -- $400 million to $500 million rather than $1 billion. But in Maryland, state housing officials have processed so many loans that they got about $20 million more to keep on going.

Today's the deadline to finish. Leaders at the state Department of Housing and Community Development say they're working frenetically to try to get every bit of the nearly $57 million committed, because what isn't approved for Emergency Mortgage Assistance loans by the end of the day must be handed back to the feds.

More in today's story.

One piece of the tale is that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development didn't start taking applications for the forgivable-loan program until June 20 in most of the country, a short window before the Congressionally mandated deadline to match the money with homeowners who qualified for it. (The deadline to actually apply was earlier this month.)

HUD spokesman Lemar Wooley said the agency went as fast as it could.

"As with any new program, it took some time to get it up and running," Wooley wrote in an email. He said the agency had to write regulations, identify contractors, put fiscal controls in place "and ensure the program was being run fairly."

Maryland and four other states were allowed to run their own versions of the federal Emergency Homeowners' Loan Program because they successfully argued that they had "substantially similar" ones already in place. (Pennsylvania's program was the model for the federal effort.) All five states think they can make enough loans to use their money up, Wooley said.

Maryland started taking applications about two-and-a-half months before HUD did elsewhere, which helped the state get more loans done.