President Obama has yet to fulfill his promise of posting all legislation on the White House Web site for five days before signing it into law.

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG


WASHINGTON

- At 12:01 p.m. on January 20 - the precise moment Barack Obama became president of the United States - a new White House Web site sprang to electronic life with a pledge to“provide a window for all Americans into the business of the government.”The next day, Mr.Obama issued a memorandum on transparency, promising to make it one of“the touchstones of this presidency.”

But on issue after issue - a raucous internal debate over whether to release memorandums detailing harsh interrogation techniques used during the Bush years, for example, or publicizing financial information about highlevel administration appointees - Mr.Obama has discovered that fulfilling his pledge is easier said than done.

He has bumped up against technological hurdles, privacy concerns and the entrenched culture of secrecy that has flourished for decades in Washington and culminated under his predecessor, President George W.Bush. Mr.Obama has vowed a break with the past, but he has not broken completely.

Press briefings by“senior administration officials”who demand anonymity, a standard feature of the Bush administration, are also commonplace in the Obama White House. Mr.Obama recently infuriated advocates of open government by asserting his right to restrict communications between federal workers and Congress. And while he has promised to be more forthcoming about his schedule, some meetings remain undisclosed.

“The administration is showing wonderful potential, but so far it is only potential,”said Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning research organization.“Being transparent is politically tough. The habit in D.C. is to hold information as tightly as you can because information is power.”

Those old habits die hard, as Mr.Obama is learning. When Attorney General Eric H.Holder Jr. and Gregory B.Craig, the White House counsel, pressed to release some Bush interrogation memorandums, they faced resistance from the Central Intelligence Agency; the internal debate has not been resolved.

When Congress asked for the names of Wall Street firms that benefited from the bailout of the American International Group, Mr.Obama’s Treasury secretary, Timothy F.Geithner, balked; so did Ben S.Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

The White House overruled them.“We thought that information belonged in the public domain,”said David Axelrod, Mr.Obama’s senior adviser.

When public-interest groups pushed Mr.Obama to put financial disclosure forms submitted by his high-level appointees on the Internet, the administration discovered that privacy laws stood in the way. Instead, the White House announced on April 3 that the records would be made available electronically - a big advance over the current paper system - but by request only, in order to meet the legal restrictions.

As a candidate and a senator, Mr.Obama was a strong backer of whistleblower protections. But as president, he issued a signing statement reserving the right to keep people who wish to report wrongdoing, known as whistleblowers, from talking to Congress in cases where their communications would be unlawful or“otherwise confidential.’’The White House says previous presidents have used similar language, but critics say Mr.Obama’s phrase - “otherwise confidential” - gives him broad authority.

“We see the ability of whistleblowers to bring forward misconducts or acts of corruption as an essential tenet to open government,”said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, which joined other advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, in writing Mr.Obama recently to demand an explanation.

In all these areas, Mr.Obama is facing challenges and limits that come with his own high standards - challenges that extend even to the White House Web site, www.whitehouse.gov. Mr.Obama has used the site in creative ways; he recently became the first American president to hold a live, online video question-and-answer session from the White House. But he has not completely fulfilled one of his basic campaign promises: to post legislation on the site for five days before signing it into law.

Mr.Axelrod said the president remained committed to openness and vowed that the government would grow more transparent.

“Have we achieved everything we want to achieve yet? No.We’ve actually been a little preoccupied. We’re trying to deal with some major challenges here,”Mr.Axelrod said.“But we’ve done some things that have never been done before.”Indeed, many advocates give Mr.Obama plaudits for setting a standard that Gary D.Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a nonpartisan government watchdog group, called a“night and day”difference from the Bush administration.