Adam Hughes, an analyst at OMB Watch, said such tradeoffs erred far too often on the side of serving short-term needs and discounting long-term risks.

A nonprofit group in Washington called OMB Watch is trying to assess just how much information agencies removed from public Web sites under the new directives.

The Energy Department, according to OMB Watch, reported that it had stacks of information waiting to be organized before it could be sent.

OMB Watch has advocated creation of an office that would oversee what data agencies publish online and the security measures they use.

Around the time of the Act's passage, OMB Watch, a government watchdog group, was developing a site that would do essentially everything the legislation required.

FedSpending.org is owned by the nonprofit OMB Watch, a group that monitors the Office of Management and Budget.

OMB Watch said it agreed to take down the data on its Web site for 30 days while the government fixed the problem.

Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, said the agency's use of Social Security numbers in the database was "deplorable."

Gary D. Bass is the founder and Executive Director of OMB Watch.

He was president of the Human Services Information Center before founding OMB Watch in 1983.