The federal government’s $700 billion bailout of banks, insurers and automakers will end after Sunday, but the measure may end up costing far less originally expected, The New York Times reported.

 In a White House briefing on Thursday, it was reported that the government had negotiated a plan with American International Group Inc. (AIG), the troubled insurer that was given $70 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), to begin repaying taxpayers.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner projected that taxpayers will lose no more $50 billion on the expiring rescue program, assuming that AIG and others that were bailed out by the legislation remain profitable.

The Treasury Department has only disbursed $387 billion of the $470 billion in TARP funds it committed, most of which went to AIG, automakers such as Chrysler and General Motors, and hundreds of banks.

And if it can fetch a good price from the corporate shares it plans to sell in coming years, the government could even break even or make money.

However, some people, including a segment of the American pubic, aren’t convinced that the program was a good idea. According to a July poll conducted for Bloomberg News, fewer than three in 10 Americans said they thought it was necessary “to prevent the financial industry from failing and drastically hurting the U.S. economy.”

 “This is the best federal program of any real size to be despised by the public like this,” said Douglas Elliott, a former investment banker now associated with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Now, as voters ready for the mid-term elections, some Republicans who voted in 2008 to enact the program have lost nominating contests for re-election or for another office.

“My career is over,” said Sen. Robert Bennett, a Utah Republican. “But I do hope that we can get the word out that TARP, number one, did save the world from a financial meltdown and, number two, did so in a manner that, I believe, won’t cost the taxpayer anything.”

“It was probably the only effective method available to us to keep from having a financial meltdown much worse than we actually had,” Elliott said. “But it really cuts against the grain for a public that is so angry at banks to think that something that so plainly helped the banks could also be good for the public.”

By any measure, the ultimate financial impact of TARP will be less than expected.

“And even if it did not all get paid back, it was still the thing to do,” Bennett said.