WASHINGTON — Senator Schumer is calling for a much more robust government role in responding to the subprime mortgage crisis, ridiculing the Bush administration’s efforts to help homeowners at risk of foreclosure.

In a speech to the Brookings Institution this morning, Mr. Schumer pushed for tighter regulation of the mortgage industry, allowing states and localities to issue tax-exempt bonds to refinance loans, and an infusion of $1 billion to dispatch foreclosure prevention counselors across the country. He also repeated his call for significantly raising caps for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, allowing the government-sponsored associations to buy up more mortgages.

In a freewheeling 30-minute address that departed from his prepared script, Mr. Schumer offered a withering assessment of the administration’s response to the subprime mortgage crisis and the wider downturn in the housing market. He said Mr. Bush and his aides were “ideologically handcuffed” by a philosophy overly reliant on the free market.

“I believe in the free market, believe me, but it isn’t perfect,” Mr. Schumer said. He added later: “It is true that left to its own devices the free market will solve this problem — negatively.”

The Bush administration has pushed for a voluntary, five-year rate freeze on subprime mortgages, a plan that Mr. Schumer said “doesn’t do much.” He cited reports that the plan would help just 10% of the borrowers who could face foreclosure over the next two years.

Mr. Schumer is the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate and chairman of the Joint Economic Committee.

While insisting that his proposals did not amount to a “government bail out,” he took aim at officials who criticized borrowers for misunderstanding their mortgages or securing loans they couldn’t pay back. “How many of you read your entire mortgage document? How many of you?” he asked an auditorium filled largely with economists. “I didn’t. I’m a Harvard lawyer.”

Mr. Schumer spoke immediately after a former Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, Lawrence Summers. Delivering a much more formal address, Mr. Summers said it was “almost certain” that the American economy was headed into a period of heavily constrained growth and “quite likely” into a recession. He added that it was “distinctly possible that we are headed into a period of the worst economic performance since the stagflation of the late 1970s and recessions of the early 1980s.”

Mr. Summers, a former president of Harvard University, called for urgent action by the federal government to prevent a recession, including a $50 to $75 billion stimulus package comprised largely of tax cuts “distributed equally among all taxpayers.”

Though he acknowledged the slim odds of a Republican president and a Democratic Congress quickly agreeing to such a package, he said it should be done before President Bush leaves office.

Mr. Schumer did not address the possibility of a stimulus package including tax cuts in his speech, and afterward he told reporters that he would have to look at the proposal before commenting.