WASHINGTON—With Congress grappling with housing legislation and a proposed rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the window is narrowing for reform in the wake of the Countrywide V.I.P. loan scandal.

"I think it dies," a prominent Wall Street lobbyist said about calls for more disclosure and reform. "It will land in one of those gray areas, and people will move on."

Indeed, leaders in both the House and Senate are signaling that they have no immediate appetite for tackling new standards to shine more light on the terms of lawmakers' home loans.

It was the terms of loans to two Senators—Democrats Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Kent Conrad of North Dakota—that set off a firestorm on Capitol Hill after Portfolio.com reported last month that they had received discounts on two loans each as part of a program the mortgage-lending giant maintained for powerful borrowers. The most recent issue of Condé Nast Portfolio reports how the Countrywide practice extended beyond Dodd and Conrad, involving congressmen, judges, and journalists, all in an attempt by Countrywide to curry favor.

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That is a loophole that needs to be eliminated, government watchdog groups argue.

"There are many good reasons the public should know more about their elected representative's homes and how they finance them," said Massie Ritsch, spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics. "Excluding their primary asset and liability from their financial reports doesn't make much sense, especially in light of the special treatment some lawmakers have gotten from their lender."

To sew up the dodge in the disclosures rules, John Cornyn, the top Republican on the Senate Ethics Committee, last month offered an amendment to the sweeping housing bill crawling through Congress. The two-page amendment, which also drew support from Barbara Boxer, who is chairwoman of the ethics panel, and its other four members, simply required Senators to report the terms of their home mortgages.

But the proposal was ruled unrelated to the broader package, blocking its consideration.

"This appears to be a loophole, and there's no reason this shouldn't be disclosed," Cornyn spokesman Brian Walsh said. "It would be a simple fix." He said Cornyn will look for another legislative vehicle to move the provision.

Amid the controversy, Politico.com contacted the offices of all 100 Senators, asking them to voluntary disclose how they received their mortgages, from whom, and if they received preferential treatment. The website eventually received responses from every office, and the survey uncovered no new special deals.

The issue has received even less attention in the House. Republicans there have used the scandal as a messaging point against the housing bill, which they charge is a bloated giveaway to reckless lenders and borrowers. One conservative group opposed to the measure called it the "Dodd-Countrywide Mortgage Bailout Bill."

But no one in the lower chamber is moving to change House rules to beef up disclosure standards.

"There's nothing wrong with doing that, and we ought to discuss it," Steny Hoyer, the House Majority Leader, told Portfolio.com.

But he said any reform would have to wait until January, when the House opens up its rules to approve them anew for the next Congress. A spokesman for John Boehner, the House minority leader, said there has been no talk among Republicans of trying to force Democrats' hand on the issue in the meantime.

By then, barring more blockbuster revelations or tough action from the Senate ethics inquiry into Dodd and Conrad, any interest in reform likely will have petered out.

That result would be in line with the fallout from previous controversies over public officials' home loans.

In 2002 the Washington Post reported that Jim Moran, a Democratic Congressman from Northern Virginia, four years prior had secured a home refinancing package from MBNA that was the largest that the credit-card lender had handed out that year. Experts called its terms unusually beneficial. Four days after finalizing the loan, Moran became the lead Democratic co-sponsor of a bill the company was pushing to tighten bankruptcy standards—a development the lawmaker called totally unrelated. As the result of a cease-fire between Democrats and Republicans, the House ethics committee declined to investigate the arrangement.

And in 1999, as Hillary Clinton was eyeing her run for a Senate seat from New York, the Clintons arranged for Democratic fundraiser Terry McAuliffe to guarantee the $1.35 million mortgage for their house in Chappaqua. Ethics experts said the arrangement passed muster, though McAuliffe's intervention would likely help the First Family, then struggling with legal debts, to secure a lower interest rate than they otherwise would have qualified for, and the White House declined to disclose what interest McAuliffe would earn. The public-relations backlash compelled the Clintons to abandon the plan and seek a conventional mortgage instead.

Last summer, a watchdog group charged that Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, received a sweetheart deal buying a parcel of land from a campaign contributor for well below its fair market value. Murkowski never disclosed the transaction on her public report, arguing that because she intended to build her residence there, it fell in the exemption. She denied any wrongdoing, but in the face of an ethics complaint from the group and mounting public criticism, she sold the land back.

Craig Holman, a lobbyist for the government watchdog Public Citizen, said given the pileup of recent loan-related scandals, Congress needs to close the disclosure loophole. And while action is increasingly unlikely this year, he said he would push lawmakers to act at the start of next year.

"As more and more members of Congress get caught, I can certainly see the 111th Congress wanting to put a lid on this," he said.