American businesses have traditionally stayed out of partisan policy debates except on issues that directly affect them. Business trade groups typically lobby for legislation involving tax, regulatory and healthcare questions that go directly to the bottom line, while avoiding hot-button social issues.

Nonetheless, the Bush White House wants to harness business on the Social Security issue to communicate with workers, fund ad campaigns and counter labor's muscle.

Each Friday, the RNC hosts representatives from the Business Roundtable -- made up of chief executives from 160 of the country's best-known corporations -- Compass and aligned organizations, along with staff from Rove's office.

At these meetings, RNC staff tally their efforts to build support for the president's plan in key congressional districts. Compass offers similar campaign-style reports. The group's executive director, Derrick Max, said in an interview that his organization had generated 300,000 telephone calls to voters in key states on Social Security, organized 150 town hall meetings on the topic and is active in 70 congressional districts. It plans to spend $18 million backing the president's initiative.

Last week, one of the huge investment firms that makes up the Securities Industry Assn. asked that the trade group "cease all funding" of groups such as Compass because they are viewed by some as "politically motivated and polarizing" and do "not represent the collective views of the SIA constituents."

In a letter written to the association's directors, the chief executive of Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. asked that the trade association board "formally issue a statement of complete neutrality" on Social Security reform, including private accounts, when it meets this week.

"Given the divergence of views among the member firms and the complete lack of unanimity that we have, it seems inadvisable to maintain our recent posture," wrote the CEO, Lisa Shalett, who represents the company's parent firm, Alliance Capital Management, on the association board.

Her letter, provided to The Times by another leading financial services firm, says that Alliance Capital believes "we serve our clients by devoting our energies to reacting to and interpreting public policy, and not by aggressively attempting to shape the course of public debate."

Despite conventional wisdom that Wall Street embraces the plan for personal accounts because it would enrich its firms, many are uninterested. That is partly because it would directly benefit only a handful of brokerages that specialize in small investors -- and because the issue is so laden with controversy and any financial crisis in the system is still years away.

The threat of union action has made many Wall Street firms wary. Some union pension fund trustees, who manage portfolios in the billions of dollars, have said they would consider an investment company's position on Social Security, among other factors, when they review funds managers.

Max, the executive director of Compass as well as the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, said that he "underestimated the impact that individual companies would feel for lending their name" to the personal accounts cause.

Given the controversy the issue engenders, he is considering inviting only trade associations to join his organizations because they give individual companies a buffer.

"If you are a CEO, you don't want your product bought and sold based on a political issue," he said.