Washington ? The Bush administration is confident it has found a novel, inexpensive way to clear overgrown forests and prevent catastrophic wildfires. Critics say it’s a blatant giveaway to timber companies.

The plan, approved last month as part of a giant spending bill, allows logging companies to cut large, commercially valuable trees in national forests in exchange for clearing smaller, more fire-prone trees and brush.

Known as “stewardship contracting,” the approach allows the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to issue 10-year contracts to private contractors for clearance work with no limits on the size of trees to be cut or the number of acres cleared.

By allowing long-term contracts, the program gives companies incentive to invest needed equipment while saving the government much of the cost of wildfire prevention — in effect paying them with trees, said Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, the plan’s chief architect.

Critics say that timber companies are unlikely stewards and say the administration is turning over huge swaths of national forests to an industry that supported President Bush in 2000.

“The bottom line: It’s a license to steal,” said Marty Hayden, legislative director for Earthjustice, an environmental advocacy group.

As a practical matter, timber companies are not going to clear worthless forest underbrush at a commercial loss, Hayden and other critics say.

“To pay for it, you need big trees, in areas that are not close to communities,” Hayden said. “These are older trees, deep in the forest, that are exactly what we do not need to be thinning.”

Compounding environmentalists’ outrage is the rapid-fire way in which majority Republicans pushed the measure through the House and Senate as a part of a $397 billion spending plan approved by Congress and signed by Bush.

The 3,000-page bill, which pays for the current budget year’s operations for nearly all agencies that are not related to defense, was approved with minimal debate amid complaints by lawmakers in both parties that they did not know what they were voting on.

“This is the subversion of democracy,” said Michael Francis of the Wilderness Society. “They’re ignoring science and just saying, ‘We’re in charge now.”‘

The Bush administration and the timber industry say stewardship contracts are the right remedy for the 190 million acres of public land considered at high risk of wildfires.

Rey, who oversees the Forest Service, said apprehension about stewardship contracts is misplaced.

“There’s nothing new or sinister or unknown to the body politic here,” he said.