WASHINGTON — The federal government on Monday tried to take charge of an increasingly acrimonious national debate over how to treat people in contact with Ebola patients by announcing guidelines that stopped short of tough measures in New York and New Jersey and were carefully devised, officials said, not to harm the effort to recruit badly needed medical workers to West Africa.

But Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey denounced the guidelines as unsafe for the people of their states, and the Pentagon appeared to be charting an entirely different course as well. Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, ordered a 21-day “controlled monitoring period” that could isolate hundreds of troops on their American bases, away from their families, when they return from the Ebola zone in West Africa.

The new policy by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, worked out by President Obama, top C.D.C. officials and others during a two-hour meeting at the White House on Sunday, requires people who have been in contact with Ebola patients to submit to an in-person checkup and a phone call from a local public health authority.

But unlike in New York and New Jersey, people would not be automatically confined to their homes, a requirement that public health experts had sharply criticized as too onerous.