This article is part of an ongoing investigation by ProPublica.com.

More than 6 million Americans are behind on their mortgage payments or facing foreclosure. Housing prices have continued to drop, and many neighborhoods across the U.S. are filled with foreclosed homes.

What exactly has the administration done in the face of such historic need? We’ve put together a guide to the administration’s major efforts to help homeowners, laying out the promise of each and how they’ve actually performed.

It’s a sobering list. Obama himself has called his approach to the foreclosure crisis one of his biggest mistakes dealing with the recession. Overall, the foreclosure programs have failed to reach more than a fraction of the homeowners they were designed to help.

Here are the depressing details:

Programs That Have Been Enacted

Plan: Help millions of homeowners by encouraging servicers to lower mortgage payments

Obama launched his “homeowner bailout,”Making Home Affordable, in the spring of 2009, with the aim of helping at least 3 million to 4 million homeowners avoid foreclosure. The program gives banks and other mortgage servicers modest incentives to adjust the terms of mortgages so that homeowners who can’t afford their current monthly payments can stay in their homes.

Reality: Mistakes, lost documents, lax oversight; billions remain unspent

As we’ve detailed, the program has been marked by deep disfunction. Mortgage servicers mishandled cases, made errors and lost documents, while government watchdogs looked on and did almost nothing. In one case, a government auditor found that mortgage servicer GMAC had made errors on 80 percent of audited cases — but kept the mistakes secret. GMAC said it didn’t reverse a single foreclosure action as a result of the sobering audit reports.

Meanwhile, as of August, only about 816,000 homeowners had received loan modifications through the program, or fewer than one in four of those who applied. The government is on track to spend only about $7 billion of the $45.6 billion in bailout funds set aside to help homeowners. As a result, nearly $30 billion meant to address the foreclosure crisis may instead be used to pay down the deficit.

To read the entire report, click here.