WASHINGTON — The federal government on Monday announced a new set of monitoring guidelines for people arriving from West Africa that stopped short of the tough measures instituted in New York and New Jersey last week, an effort to bring uniformity to a messy patchwork of responses by states.

The new policy, which federal health officials said was an effort to strike a balance between safety and civil liberties, would require returning heath care workers, or people who had been near Ebola patients, to submit to an in-person checkup and a phone call from a local public health authority.

That is looser than the stay-home quarantine policies in New York and New Jersey, and many believed that the long-awaited federal response would be unlikely to satisfy the governors of those states, who believe the government needs to be more proactive in preventing potential Ebola patients from spreading the virus.