WASHINGTON  The Obama administration is considering forgoing legislation and issuing an executive order that would authorize the president to incarcerate some terrorism suspects indefinitely, White House officials said Friday.

Such an order would be controversial  seemingly aligning the administration with a disputed legal doctrine of former President George W. Bush, whose lawyers held that the president had sweeping authority in wartime to imprison those he deemed threats to national security.

Obama officials sought to play down the significance of the discussions by an administration panel, saying that consideration of such an order was still in an early phase and subject to change. They said that lawyers had not written a specific proposal and that nothing had been submitted to the White House for review by senior officials.

Still, the possibility of the order appeared to reflect increasing frustration within the administration over the difficulties posed by the effort to meet Mr. Obama’s commitment to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by January and the dwindling options for dealing with the detainees before then.