Thinking about trading your gas guzzling beater in for a new, fuel efficient vehicle under the Obama Administration's "cash for clunkers" program? Hope you have a Plan B.

The Transportation Department is freezing the program after only four days because it appears it will have exhausted its allotted $950 million by midnight Thursday.

A snippet from the Detroit Free Press:

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government will suspend the popular cash-for-clunkers program after less than four days in business, telling Congress that the plan would burn through its $950-million budget by midnight, several sources told the Free Press.

 

The Michigan delegation was holding an emergency meeting convened by Rep. John Dingell, D-Dearborn, to discuss their next steps. The U.S. Department of Transportation did not immediately comment on its plans for the program, or what would happen to deals in progress.

The decision to suspend the plan came after auto dealers warned the government today that it was in danger of losing track of how many trades had actually been made.

The plan offering owners of old cars and trucks $3,500 or $4,500 toward a new, more efficient vehicle has proven wildly popular, with 22,782 trades certified by federal officials since Monday. But the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told dealers Wednesday that a vast majority of transactions submitted were being rejected for incomplete or illegible paperwork.

A survey of 2,000 dealers by the National Automobile Dealers Association, the results of which were obtained by the Free Press, found about 25,000 deals not yet approved by NHTSA, or about 13 trades per store. With 23,005 dealers asking to be part of the program, auto dealers may have already arranged the sale of more than the 250,000 vehicles that federal officials expected the plan to generate.

It appears that the feds have been overwhelmed by the strong public response to the program.

Another Free Press excerpt:

Joe Serra, owner of Serra Automotive Group in Grand Blanc, said the system for submitting deals simply didn't work.

"Their capacity to accept the applications is not adequate," Serra said. "Dealers are spending all day trying to submit the applications. ... I have not spoken to one dealer that has received approval, and or has been funded, for even a single transaction."

Ken Czubay, Ford Motor Co.'s vice president of U.S. sales and marketing, said many Ford dealers are worried that they will be out thousands of dollars per car if they sell a vehicle to the consumer, disable the engine, and find out later the funding has been exhausted.

"I think it was a well-intended program ... and frankly the program at this very early stage has to be viewed as a huge success," Czubay said. "We are going to be working with the government to say, are we accomplishing all the things we want?"