Despite a major recent surge in Federal Housing Administration lending nationwide, several Massachusetts lenders have opted to drop out of the program entirely.

Two such lenders, Greylock Federal Credit Union and Saugus Federal Credit Union, both said FHA loans were a miniscule portion of their lending operations and not worth maintaining.

"It’s a program that we have made almost no use of over the last five years," said John Bissell, senior vice president for Pittsfield-based Greylock, the top mortgage lender in Berkshire County.

Greylock prefers to service its own loans, he added, and it wasn’t able to service loans made through the FHA program. And since the credit union was able to make many first-time homebuyer loans without going through FHA, it decided to let the designation drop this year.

That decision was reflected in a July list from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which counted Saugus FCU among other local FHA dropouts.

Susan Dunbar, lending manager, said the credit union didn’t find it necessary to maintain its own designation, largely because lenders will be able to do FHA loans through correspondent lenders as of January 1.  With that flexibility – combined with Saugus FCU’s already-low count of FHA loans – the institution decided to drop it.

Also included on the list was Boston-based First Trade Union Bank, which stated that it also voluntarily decided to drop its FHA designation, but will re-evaluate that decision in 2011.