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With today’s announcement, the Treasury is giving itself room to provide money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program beyond loans already committed to General Motors Corp., GMAC LLC and Chrysler LLC.

That’s consistent with analysts’ speculation yesterday that suppliers, such as GM’s bankrupt former parts unit Delphi Corp., might be eligible for assistance. The guidelines may encourage more guessing on what companies and industries are next, said Vincent Reinhart, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

Officials “much prefer discretion, and so they would view the statement as being constructively ambiguous,” Reinhart said. “It’s appropriate that they end the year the way they spent most of it — that is, adding uncertainty into an environment in which there’s a lot of uncertainty.”

GM reached an agreement on the terms of the loans today and received its first payment of $4 billion, according to statements from the automaker and the Treasury. The government is still working on the loan to Chrysler and is “committed to closing it on a timeline that will meet near-term funding needs,” said Brookly McLaughlin, a Treasury spokeswoman, in an e-mail.

Slippery Slope

The guidelines don’t bind the government, so the lack of specifics gives President-elect Barack Obama plenty of leeway to decide who succeeds and fails when he takes office in three weeks. The bailout was originally designed to buy assets from banks and has instead become a fund for Treasury to prop up lenders, insurers, carmakers, auto-finance companies, and now, any firm that may be important to those industries.

“The further you go, the slipperier the slope becomes, the more you open the door to anyone who says, ‘Look, my firm is in trouble, I need help too,’” said Lyle Gramley, a former Federal Reserve governor and now a Washington-based senior economic adviser for Stanford Group Co. “We don’t want to go any further down that road than we absolutely have to.”