In a new retrospective, AAF’s Regulatory Policy team, Dan Bosch and Dan Goldbeck, take a look back at regulatory policy in 2018. Last year was the first year since AAF began tracking regulations (going back to 2005) that “federal agencies published net regulatory cost savings for a calendar year,” they note.

Takeaways from their retrospective include:

• Federal agencies finalized 324 regulations with estimated costs, savings, or paperwork impacts resulting in cost savings of $7.8 billion;
• Half of the top-10 largest deregulatory actions include overall estimated cost reductions in excess of $1 billion, while only one regulatory action exceeds that threshold in terms of new costs; and
• On net, the Department of Agriculture issued regulations with the highest costs, while the Department of Health and Human Services issued regulations with the greatest savings.

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