Washington ? The Environmental Protection Agency will be free to approve pesticides without consulting wildlife agencies to determine if the chemical might harm plants and animals protected by the Endangered Species Act, according to new Bush administration rules.

The streamlining by the Interior and Commerce departments represents “a more efficient approach to ensure protection of threatened and endangered species,” officials with the two agencies, EPA and the Agriculture Department said in a joint statement Thursday.

It also is intended to head off future lawsuits, the officials said.

Under the Endangered Species Act, EPA has been required to consult with Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service and Commerce’s National Marine Fisheries Service each time it licenses a new pesticide. But that hasn’t been happening for some time.

“Because of the complexity of consultations to examine the effects of pest-control products, there have been almost no consultations completed in the past decade,” the officials acknowledged in their statement.

Steve Williams, the Fish and Wildlife director, said it was too complex to have to consider every possible result among the interaction of hundreds of active chemicals and 1,200 threatened and endangered species.

The two services are responsible for enforcing the endangered species law. EPA said it would consult those services if it determined a pesticide could adversely affect a species. But the new rules let EPA formally skip the consultations if it decides there would likely be no harm.

The heads of the two wildlife services will presume EPA’s review work is adequate.

“The two agencies completed a scientific review of EPA’s risk assessment process, and concluded it allows EPA to make accurate assessments of the likely effects of pesticides on threatened and endangered species,” said Bill Hogarth, who heads the fisheries service.

But the two services still plan to review EPA’s methods occasionally, just to make sure. And EPA can still ask for outside consultations if it wants to. In that case, the wildlife agencies would have final say on whether a species might be harmed by a pesticide.

By not requiring so many consultations, the officials said it was more likely the ones that matter most would get done. The Endangered Species Act was signed into law by President Nixon in 1973.

The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that has repeatedly sued the government to force species protections, reported this week that the plight of nearly a third of all threatened and endangered species — 375 — is aggravated by pesticides.