U.S. Reaches a Settlement on Decisions About Endangered Species

Under the agreement, species that the department has already deemed to be at potential risk but whose status remains in limbo, including the New England cottontail and the greater sage grouse of the West, will take priority in the Fish and Wildlife Service workload.

If approved by a federal judge, the settlement would bring about the most sweeping change in the enforcement of the Endangered Species Act since the 1990s, when the department streamlined a procedure for protecting the habitats that endangered species need to recover.

The backlog of more than 250 cases resulted from lawsuits and petitions filed by environmental groups, a strategy for forcing the Fish and Wildlife Service to be more assertive about fulfilling its wildlife-protection mandate. Over the past four years, the service has fielded requests for listing more than 1,230 species as endangered or threatened.

Agency officials have said that responding to those petitions and to lawsuits, which centered on the agency’s failure to meet deadlines set under the law, kept them from focusing on the animals, plants and other species that were at greatest risk.

The new plan, part of a settlement of a range of cases brought by the group Wild Earth Guardians, will enable officials “to focus efforts on the species most in need of protection, something we haven’t been able to do in years,” said Gary Frazer, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s assistant director for endangered species.

Mr. Frazer suggested that a majority of the 251 listing decisions would result in new protections for the species involved.

Interior Department officials and Wild Earth Guardians predict that if Emmet G. Sullivan, a judge in Federal District Court in Washington, accepts the accord, other courts and litigants will defer to the new “work plan.”

“It’s a good bet in a couple of senses,” said Jay Tutchton, a lawyer for Wild Earth Guardians.

First, Mr. Tutchton noted, it is widely recognized that the Interior Department lacks the resources to deal with a barrage of lawsuits and petitions. “You can’t get blood out of a stone,” he said. “Judges understand that.”

For another thing, he said, judges “don’t like to interfere with each other’s orders.”

The federal government’s negotiations with the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that also brought many suits against the Interior Department, reached an impasse about a month ago, participants said.

In an interview Tuesday, Noah Greenwald of the center said that the department’s failure to keep pace with candidates for the endangered species list was more of a reflection of a “lack of political will” than distractions posed by excess litigation.

Today, 1,374 domestic species are protected under the Endangered Species Act.

The new agreement sets a precise timetable that could increase the average number of species added to the list to 50 annually, up from an average of 8 under the Bush administration and 29 under the Obama administration.