“The N.S.A. cannot operate in the domestic infrastructure,” retired Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the former director of the agency, said on Friday at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “You can’t defend something you can’t see.”

But there is no political appetite to reverse decades of limits on intelligence agencies to monitor and defend network traffic inside the United States.

Instead, Biden administration officials said they would seek a deeper partnership with the private sector, tapping the knowledge of emerging hacking threats gathered by technology companies and cybersecurity firms.

The hope, current and former officials say, is to set up a real-time threat sharing arrangement, whereby private companies would send threat data to a central repository where the government could pair it with intelligence from the National Security Agency, the C.I.A. and other spy shops, to provide a far earlier warning than is possible today.