Week in Regulation

A Billion and Change

This week regulators added $1.1 billion in total costs, led by a supplemental proposal from the Department of Energy (DOE) and a pair of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules. Annual costs were $332 million, compared to more than $910 million in benefits; paperwork grew by 1.1 million burden hours. The per capita regulatory burden for 2016 is $428.

Regulatory Toplines

  • New Proposed Rules: 54
  • New Final Rules: 87
  • 2016 Total Pages of Regulation: 61,098
  • 2016 Final Rules: $99.6 Billion
  • 2016 Proposed Rules: $39.1 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.

CFR_9_02_2016

DOE published a revised proposal to tighten conservation standards for conventional cooking products, including cook tops and conventional ovens. The original proposal estimated $600 million in present value costs, $577 million in benefits, and $34 million in annual costs. The supplemental notice raises the total cost figure to $800 million, lowers benefits to $382 million, and increases annual burdens to $42 million.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued the rule with the largest paperwork burden this week. Its final rule controlling methane emissions at landfills will cost roughly $54 million, while generating $430 million benefits through a reduction of 285,000 metric tons of methane annually, equivalent to 7.1 million tons of carbon dioxide. Paperwork is one of the largest drivers of costs, at 679,000 hours and $45 million in annual costs.

Affordable Care Act

Since passage, based on total lifetime costs of the regulations, the Affordable Care Act has imposed costs of $48.5 billion in final state and private-sector burdens and 171.4 million annual paperwork hours.

Dodd-Frank

SEC issued a final rule governing data access to security-based swap repositories. The rule essentially compels swaps to make data available to certain regulators, including SEC, FSOC, CFTC, any Federal Reserve Bank, and certain foreign regulators. Total costs top $100 million, with 35,900 paperwork burden hours.

Click here to view the total estimated revised costs from Dodd-Frank; since passage, the legislation has produced more than 74.7 million final paperwork burden hours and imposed $36.2 billion in direct compliance costs.

Total Burdens

Since January 1, the federal government has published $138.7 billion in compliance costs ($99.6 billion in final rules) and has imposed 122.2 million in net paperwork burden hours (86.8 million from final rules). Click below for the latest Reg Rodeo findings.

Reg Rodeo_09_02_2016

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