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"Changes like this appear to water down an organization that contributes to the public's confidence."
But Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, denied that the order reduced the authority and independence of the panel.
Fratto pointed to a federal statute that makes it a general duty of all government officials to report lawbreaking to the Justice Department. Because of this, he said, there is still a "widely understood background presumption" that the board can contact the attorney general even though Bush deleted the authority to make criminal referrals from its list of core responsibilities.
Fratto also said the changes merely updated the board's responsibilities after Congress in 2004 created a director of national intelligence to run the intelligence community. The order says the director is the person responsible for making any criminal referrals to the Justice Department.
Still, critics contend that the director of national intelligence cannot play the same watchdog role as the oversight board because he is part of the intelligence world, not independent from it, and so there may be occasions in which he has signed off on an activity whose legality might be questioned by outsiders.
Some analysts said the order is just the latest example of actions the administration has taken since the 2001 terrorist attacks that have scaled back intelligence reforms enacted in the 1970s.
In his 1976 executive order, for example, Ford also banned foreign intelligence agencies, such as the National Security Agency, from collecting information about Americans. The Bush administration bypassed that rule by having domestic agencies collect information about Americans and then hand the data to the NSA, The Wall Street Journal reported this week.
Ford's order also banned assassination. But Bush authorized the CIA to draw up a list of Al Qaeda suspects who could be summarily killed.
The administration decided that such targeted killings were an exception to the rule because it was wartime.
In 1978, Congress enacted a law requiring warrants for all wiretaps on domestic soil. But now spies are free to monitor Americans' international calls and e-mails without court supervision if the wiretaps are aimed at targets overseas.
In 1980, Congress enacted a law requiring that the full House and Senate intelligence committees be briefed about most spying activities. The Bush administration asserted that it could withhold significant amounts of information from the committees, briefing congressional leaders instead.
Finally, executive orders were once widely understood to be binding unless a president revoked them, an act that would notify Congress that the rules had changed. But the administration has decided that Bush is free to secretly authorize spies to ignore executive orders - including one that restricts surveillance on US citizens traveling overseas - without rescinding them.
Some critics of the post-Watergate era have contended that its investigations and reforms went too far. For example, Cheney, who was Ford's chief of staff, said in December 2005 that "a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam ... served to erode the authority, I think, the president needs to be effective, especially in a national security area."
But Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., the former chief counsel to the Senate committee that undertook the 1975-76 investigation into intelligence abuses, said that by rolling back the post-Watergate reforms, the Bush administration had made intelligence abuses more likely to occur.
"What the Bush administration has systematically done is to try to limit both internal oversight - things like the Intelligence Oversight Board - and effective external oversight by the Congress," Schwarz said, adding, "It's profoundly disappointing if you understand American history, and it's profoundly harmful to the United States."
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