President Obama’s promise to bring in an era of “change we can believe in” is starting to look more like a situation of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”—at least where the financial crisis is concerned, say some of the new administration’s frustrated supporters.

There were high hopes for a break from the past. The Bush White House was heavily criticized for its incestuous relationship with Wall Street, as epitomized by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the former head of Goldman Sachs, who oversaw last year’s $700 billion financial-rescue package.

It turns out that the Obama administration has plenty of its own finance-industry insiders. At least 25 senior Obama administration officials previously held executive or board-of-director posts with some of the globe’s biggest financial houses, according to a new analysis for Portfolio.com by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), a campaign-finance watchdog group. (To see a full list of the officials with previous jobs on Wall Street, click here.)

In January, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced new rules to curb lobbying on the bailout bill the same day he announced that his new chief of staff would be Mark Patterson, Goldman Sach’s former top lobbyist. A Treasury spokeswoman told reporters at the time that Patterson "brings significant expertise to the job" and that he had signed a pledge not to work on matters related to his former employer.

Other top administration officials with tight finance-industry ties include White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, who served on the board of embattled mortgage giant Freddie Mac and earned millions as an investment banker for Wasserstein Perella. Former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers, President Obama's top economic adviser, also cashed in big-time from speaking before various Wall Street firms and from the hedge fund D.E. Shaw Group, where he was a managing director. Other financial insiders include Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin, formerly president of Hartford Financial Services; former managing director of Citigroup Michael Froman, who is now a top aide to President Obama, advising on international economic affairs; and the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Stability Herbert M. Allison Jr., who previously served as president of Merrill Lynch.

The officials have senior roles not only in Treasury, but also in the Security and Exchange Commission, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. This is the first time that CRP has done such an analysis, so there are no equivalent numbers for the Bush administration.

One prominent critic of the administration’s "insiderism" is liberal economist Dean Baker. “I don’t see huge differences” between the Obama and Bush administrations' handling of the crisis. Baker is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal Washington think tank. While the administration has taken on unprecedented billions in debt backing the big financial houses, average homeowners are still waiting for relief, he says. “I think it is clear that they have come second.”

Of course, in the middle of the global financial crisis, is it a bad thing to have former Wall Street insiders who know the dark secrets of finance on the public payroll?

Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams said having staff with experience in the financial industry was perfectly reasonable. “I think that Treasury is well served to have people with both private- and public-sector experience, particularly in such a critical period. It only makes sense that the Treasury would have people with financial-market experience. We’re the Treasury Department,” Williams said.

That was certainly the argument of the Bush administration, and some say the Obama administration has gone too far in taking the same "what’s good for Wall Street is good for America" approach. Critics say that the Obama administration was tone-deaf on the issue of recipients of the $700 billion bailout handing out bonuses, even as millions of Americans were losing their homes. Top earners at Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and other U.S. banks received an estimated $32.6 billion in bonuses in 2008, according to a new report by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.