This week regulators published $162 billion in regulatory costs, with $56 million in annual burdens, and $15 million in benefits; paperwork grew by more than 470,000 hours. In addition, regulators finalized more than $570 million in rules that were proposed earlier this year, with more than 300,000 additional paperwork burden hours. Rules for stratospheric ozone protection and closed captioning for movie theatres led the week. The per capita regulatory burden for 2016 is $620.

Regulatory Toplines

• New Proposed Rules: 46
• New Final Rules: 65
• 2016 Total Pages of Regulation: 87,408
• 2016 Final Rules: $153.85 Billion
• 2016 Proposed Rules: $47.1 Billion

The American Action Forum (AAF) has catalogued regulations according to their codification in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). The CFR is organized into 50 titles, with each title corresponding to an industry or part of government. This snapshot will help to determine which sectors of the economy receive the highest number of regulatory actions.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) published its final rule providing for closed captioning in movie theatres. The rule implements the Americans with Disabilities Act to require theatres to have a specified number of captioning devises and audio description devices. Total costs top $113 million, but DOJ only spoke qualitatively about the benefits.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule that lists certain products as “acceptable,” “subject to use conditions,” and “unacceptable” in the agency’s effort to preserve stratospheric ozone. The annualized cost of the measure is $71 million and the agency declined to monetize the benefits.

Tracking Midnight Regulation

This week, OIRA received six regulations, down from eight last week; all were final rules, but none were economically significant. OIRA discharged 12 regulations, up from ten from last week, but none were economically significant measures. Notable regulations released last week include:

• Preventing Workplace Violence in Healthcare
• Monitoring Rule for Public Water Systems
• Mobile Wireless Devices for Voice Calls on Aircraft

For the month, OIRA concluded review of 57 regulations, more than any other month in 2016. According to a calculation from the Congressional Research Service, all regulations submitted to Congress or published (whichever is later) after May 30, 2016 will be subject to the Congressional Review Act’s disapproval process next year.

Affordable Care Act

There were two ACA regulations this week, but combined they added only $1.2 million in costs and 14,000 paperwork hours. Since passage, based on total lifetime costs of the regulations, the Affordable Care Act has imposed costs of $51.6 billion in final state and private-sector burdens and 172.4 million annual paperwork hours.

Dodd-Frank

Click here to view the total estimated revised costs from Dodd-Frank; since passage, the legislation has produced more than 74.8 million final paperwork burden hours and imposed $36.5 billion in direct compliance costs.

Total Burdens

Since January 1, the federal government has published more than $200 billion in compliance costs ($153.85 billion in final rules) and has imposed 138.6 million in net paperwork burden hours (110.6 million from final rules). Click below for the latest Reg Rodeo findings.