“It’s just not acceptable. You’re talking about the same banks that caused the foreclosure crisis, took record bonuses in the past and continue to,” said George Goehl, executive director of National Training and Information Center, a nonprofit community reinvestment group in Chicago.

Some politicians are calling for banks to claw back bonuses because they were based on earnings that vanished in the financial crisis. President Obama lashed out on Thursday, calling bankers shameful for awarding themselves nearly $20 billion in bonuses for 2008.

Many senior banking executives, including Vikram S. Pandit, the chief executive of Citigroup, agreed to forgo 2008 bonuses. But Washington policy makers did not limit bonuses for rank-and-file employees when the government hastily arranged the sweeping bailout last fall. So banks were free to pay what they wished for 2008, and pay they did.

At Citigroup, Mr. Pandit in November was planning to reduce the total bonus pool by about 40 percent from 2007 levels. But after the company grabbed a second lifeline from Washington, executives reduced payouts even more, cutting the total in half, according to several people close to the situation. One of those people said officials in the Treasury Department, then under Henry M. Paulson Jr., signed off on the size and the structure of the compensation plan. Pay for several dozen of Citigroup’s senior managers was cut between 40 and 85 percent, and the bank imposed new policies to claw back ill-gotten bonuses and limit severance pay.

That could set the stage for a new round of changes. Wall Street compensation in general  and bonuses in particular  are coming under intense scrutiny from lawmakers. Possible reforms include caps on pay, greater use of stock compensation and mandates to return more money to shareholders, rather than workers. The government could also request a seat on the board of every company that accepted taxpayer money.

Even some bankers, at Citigroup and other institutions, said they felt a bit ashamed about getting bonuses in hard times like this. But none of them offered to return the money.

“I’m certainly not giving my bonus back,” said the Citigroup banking associate, who, like other several other Citigroup employees, declined to disclose his payout and asked to remain anonymous, for fear of angering his bosses.