WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is weighing plans to circumvent Congress and act on its own to curtail tax benefits for United States companies that relocate overseas to lower their tax bills, seeking to stanch a recent wave of so-called corporate inversions, Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said on Tuesday.

Treasury Department officials are rushing to assemble an array of options that would essentially wipe out the economic incentive for the deals, Mr. Lew said. No final decision has been made.

“The question is, Can we do enough that it will materially change the economics of inversions so that companies will make different decisions?” Mr. Lew said in an interview. “The things we are looking at look to me like they could very materially change the economics of inversions.”

The action comes in the face of a recent increase in United States companies reaching deals to reorganize overseas, creating an explosive political issue that Mr. Obama has called a lack of “economic patriotism.” Investment banks have been counseling companies to pursue such transactions because of the potential tax benefits. Two large United States pharmaceutical companies — the drug giant AbbVie, based in Illinois, and the generic manufacturer Mylan, based in Pennsylvania — agreed to such deals last month. The Walgreen Company, owner of the drugstore chain, considered using an inversion but was unable to follow through.