Current and some past Treasury officials strongly dispute such characterizations. The Treasury Department under Bush has crafted pension reform legislation, pushed reforms at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other government-sponsored enterprises, established a new office to combat terrorism financing, helped secure debt relief in Iraq and led efforts to rebuild the economies of Iraq and Afghanistan. It has battled identity theft and prodded the World Bank into measuring the effectiveness of its loans more precisely.
The Treasury was deeply involved in hashing out the details of Bush's signature tax cut of 2001, said Mark Weinberger, who was Bush's first assistant secretary for tax policy. Pamela F. Olson, his successor at the Treasury, said the department formulated the proposed Lifetime Savings Accounts and Retirement Savings Accounts, which are likely to be centerpieces of Bush's second-term efforts to reduce taxation on savings and investment.
 
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"Let's focus on the results," said Robert S. Nichols, a Treasury spokesman. "Under President Bush's leadership, the economy has been growing at rates as fast as any in nearly 20 years. That growth is largely the result of good monetary policy coupled with the president's tax relief, and the Treasury Department has played a key role."
Treasury officials declined to make Snow available to discuss the agency's stature, but in an interview on policy issues, the secretary said he will lead the administration's second-term effort to overhaul the tax code. And he said the White House is closely consulting the Treasury on financing a Social Security measure that will likely involve borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars to fund personal investment accounts.
But the agency holds a much lower profile than it did under President Bill Clinton and other recent presidents. In the 1990s, the Clinton Treasury beat back free-spending agencies and tax-cut advocates to help reduce, then eliminate, the budget deficit. Rubin, who served as secretary from 1995 to 1999, and Summers, who was his deputy, dominated internal administration debates, often overruling White House political advisers and national security policymakers over how to handle currency crises in Mexico, Russia and Asia.
The department also held powerhouse status during President Ronald Reagan's second term, when Secretary James A. Baker III and his deputy, Richard G. Darman, slaughtered Republican sacred cows, such as investment tax credits, to secure the far-reaching tax-law changes of 1986.
From the beginning of the Bush administration, the White House appeared intent on "right-sizing" the Treasury's influence from the exceptional levels of the Clinton years, senior administration officials acknowledge. In Bush's first State of the Union address, the White House ignored Treasury's objections and included an important statistic concerning the national debt, even though O'Neill himself protested that the number was wrong, according to a biography of the former Treasury secretary by journalist Ron Suskind.
In part, the department's reduced status stemmed from a government-wide reorganization following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when it lost the Customs Service, the Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to other departments.
But it has manifested itself in other ways as well. In early 2002, for example, top Treasury officials were excluded from White House meetings convened by Gary Edson, then deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs, concerning a major foreign-aid initiative, according to current and former administration officials familiar with the episode. The Treasury was kept in the dark until a few days before Bush unveiled the initiative, which led to the establishment of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, responsible for delivering billions of dollars to a select group of countries deemed to have particularly good economic policies. Reached by telephone, Edson declined to comment.
The department eventually played a significant role in shaping the program, but its exclusion from the initial planning stages of such an important international economic undertaking was a sharp break from earlier practices.
More recently, the agency has been hit with a spate of high-level departures. Since December, the Treasury has lost not only Abernathy, the assistant secretary for financial institutions, but also its deputy secretary, Samuel W. Bodman; its undersecretary for domestic finance, Brian Roseboro; its acting assistant secretary for tax policy, Gregory F. Jenner; and its representative on the World Bank's executive board, Carole Brookins.
Though some turnover is to be expected between presidential terms, Abernathy's sudden resignation was prompted in part by exasperation with what he saw as micromanagement from the White House, according to sources at the Treasury, former Treasury employees and Senate sources, including Bair. Jenner, who held the top tax policy post on an interim basis, left angrily last month after he was told the White House was not planning to pursue his permanent confirmation, according to two senior Senate tax aides.
Jenner declined to comment.
Administration officials say Bush will soon announce an even stronger team of replacements to help iron out the details and sell upcoming tax and Social Security proposals.
But in the case of the tax policy job -- a once-coveted post -- the White House has been searching unsuccessfully for more than a year to fill the job permanently.
"No question, it's still a prestigious job, but the question is, 'Am I going to be in on policy? Am I going to be the incubator of new ideas?'" said a Republican who is often cited as a candidate for the job. "That's the key."
