In recent months, the federal government has stepped into the financial markets in unprecedented ways. The Federal Reserve rescued investment bank Bear Stearns in March. And Congress, in its big housing legislation, is reinforcing a government safety net for mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and shoring up the U.S. housing market.

What’s next? Making sure it all works as planned — and that Wall Street plays fair in the process.

Given the current state of the economy, Congress is expected to maintain a robust economic agenda in the coming months, including a stimulus package that would include infrastructure projects and other domestic spending to prime the pump.

But much of the work ahead on the economy will relate to oversight: watching over the financial institutions that have new relationships with the government to protect both investors and taxpayers from unintended consequences.

High on the agenda of the financial services committees are the mortgage servicing companies, which many lawmakers say have been too slow to modify the terms of exotic mortgages that many borrowers are struggling to pay. The big housing package (HR 3221), for example, would bring the government in to help some of those borrowers refinance into new loans.

The program, which the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) will run, would be voluntary, requiring both the borrower and loan servicer to agree to the new loan. But the holder of the current mortgage would have to accept a substantial write-down of the current loan’s value for the FHA to back a new, more affordable loan, something that has raised questions about how eager they will be to participate.

House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., one of the principal architects of the housing bill, said he expects “significant participation” from loan servicing companies. At a July 25 hearing, he asked loan servicers if the industry structure leads to an inherent conflict between their efforts to help homeowners and their obligations to investors who own the loans. If so, then “by next year we will have to work on abolishing that form,” he said.

Representatives of Wells Fargo and Bank of America, major loan servicers, told Frank that they have an obligation to investors to minimize losses on troubled loans, which is usually done by reducing the interest rate, but not the principal, on those loans. However, reducing the principal is more likely to help homeowners facing foreclosure in the current crisis, and they said the housing bill would help them do that.

Senate Banking Chairman Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., also said he would like to see loan servicers take advantage of the bill’s provisions to “very quickly” get homeowners out of loans they can’t afford. “I think this is an opportunity for them to demonstrate what they claim is their willingness . . . to sit down and have workouts with their borrowers,” he said.

Frank and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., also called on the industry to delay or cancel foreclosures until the law takes effect Oct. 1. “I would hope that no one would be foreclosed upon between now and Oct. 1 who would have qualified for this program had the effective date been immediate,” Frank said. “And that is within your power to do. You can show some forbearance.”

Frank and Dodd are also planning to take a closer look at the investment banking industry, particularly in the wake of the Bear Stearns collapse.

As the credit crisis worsened in March, and after the Federal Reserve made a loan to commercial bank JP Morgan Chase to help it take over the troubled Bear Stearns, the Fed also began lending to investment banks directly.

Previously, Fed lending had been available only to commercial banks, which generally have to submit to greater regulatory oversight than investment banks. These are loans of last resort for financial institutions when capital from private-sector sources becomes unavailable. After opening the lending facility to large Wall Street banks, regulators may decide they need greater transparency from those institutions, particularly with regard to capital levels and financial risk.

The Fed acknowledges that regulators need to further examine the implications of granting emergency loans to non-commercial banks.

“One possibility would be to confine such borrowing to circumstances in which the Federal Reserve judges that the stability of the financial system is at risk,” Fed Vice Chairman Donald L. Kohn said in a May 29 speech. “Another would be to grant broker-dealers the same sort of regular access enjoyed by commercial banks.”

“Whether broader regulatory changes for broker-dealers are necessary is a difficult question that deserves further study,” he added.

Finally, Congress is widely expected to follow up on the decision to allow the Treasury Department to buy stock in Fannie and Freddie, as well as extend the two companies bigger lines of credit, if they run into financial danger.

A failure by either could plunge worldwide debt markets into turmoil, particularly if the mortgage financiers had trouble raising new cash to cover their existing $1.5 trillion debt.

By stepping in to explicitly guarantee Fannie and Freddie’s finances, the Treasury Department cemented the market’s long-held belief that the two companies enjoyed government backing.

Both have long paid below-market interest rates because of that implied guarantee.

In the aftermath of the rescue, lawmakers may revisit the pair’s continued existence as quasi-public entities.

“As to Fannie and Freddie, yes, that’s a hybrid form that none of us here created that we should look at, and we will look at,” Frank said on the House floor July 23.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., agreed: “I think down the road a bit we should review the hybrid nature of Fannie and Freddie.”