WASHINGTON — House members from both parties are asking the Federal Reserve to intervene and steady the shaken student loan market.

The request Monday came a day after the central bank answered a distress call from the credit market, with a pledge to supply a $30 billion line of credit to back up the assets of Bear Stearns & Co., the investment firm acquired at a fire-sale price by rival JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., chairman of the House Financial Services subcommittee on capital markets, and 31 other lawmakers asked Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke for the Fed to inject cash into the student loan market by using a special lending operation.

"In these difficult economic times, we believe that the Federal Reserve System should work ... to restore a smooth functioning of this market sector and to avoid negative economic outcomes," they told Bernanke in the letter. If students "are unable to secure loans in the fall, we would not only severely impair their long-term earnings capacity, but we would also impair our nation's economic prospects," it said.

The central bank's aggressive and unprecedented actions come as the financial crisis deepens. On Sunday, it scrambled to finish a deal to back up the Bear Stearns takeover. Last week, it pumped $200 billion into the system in a new loan program.

On the education-finance front, the lawmakers want the Federal Reserve to allow investment firms and banks to use bonds backed by student loans as collateral for the loans of safe Treasury securities that the Fed agreed to make available for 28 days in that $200 billion infusion plan.

Fed spokeswoman Susan Stawick declined to comment on the letter, which was made public by Kanjorski's office on Tuesday.

Last month, Kanjorski and several House Democrats asked the Treasury and Education departments to bolster the student loan market by working with institutions such as the Fed and the Federal Home Loan Bank System.

In recent weeks, distress in the $330 billion market for auction-rate securities has rippled into the student loan market. About $80 billion of the auction securities market is made up of bundles of student loans. Since some of the investments are backed by troubled bond insurers, investors have been reluctant to buy, straining the student lenders that sell the securities to raise cash.

As a result, several states recently suspended their college loan programs. Nineteen student lenders have stopped making certain types of federally guaranteed student loans, either temporarily or permanently, according to the lawmakers' letter to Bernanke.

Relatively smaller lenders such as College Loan Corp. and Nelnet Inc. have been forced to scale back as their ability to sell packages of student loans to investors has been crimped. Sallie Mae, the nation's largest student lender, has been roiled by financial losses and a failed buyout but is well-financed and somewhat insulated from the auction market turmoil, experts say.

Sallie Mae, however, has recently begun to cut back on the types of student loans it will make, shying away from lending to students it considers unlikely to graduate or attending schools with inferior graduation rates.

Shares of SLM Corp., the formal name of Sallie Mae, rose 71 cents, or 4.3 percent, to $17.25 in early afternoon trading Tuesday. Nelnet shares advanced 60 cents, or 6 percent, to $10.54.