A $3 billion week here, a $3 billion week there. Regulators matched their output from last week, and despite a few deregulatory measures, managed to add new net burdens. Total costs topped $3.1 billion, with $751 million in annual burdens, $0.2 million in benefits, and 1.6 million paperwork burden hours. An Affordable Care Act (ACA) rule for Long-Term Care drove the burdens this week. The per capita regulatory burden for 2016 is $500.

Regulatory Toplines

• New Proposed Rules: 46
• New Final Rules: 69
• 2016 Total Pages of Regulation: 69,998
• 2016 Final Rules: $112.66 Billion
• 2016 Proposed Rules: $49.48 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 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued two deregulatory moves this week. One revised a respiratory protection standard for the shipyard and construction industries. On net, it would cut annual costs by $3.4 million and remove 150,000 paperwork hours. The second proposal is in response to President Obama’s executive order on regulatory reform. It removes $3.2 million in costs and more than 120,000 paperwork hours. For 2016, there have been $2.3 billion in total cost reductions from deregulatory measures.

Affordable Care Act

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) published a final rule for Long-Term Care, a measure tangentially related to the ACA. The 185-page regulation is ostensibly designed to reduce “procedural burdens on providers.” However, it reports $758 million in annual burdens ($99 million higher than the proposed rule) and 1.9 million paperwork burden hours. During the implementation period, costs could exceed $3.1 billion.

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 173.4 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 $36.3 billion in direct compliance costs.

Total Burdens

Since January 1, the federal government has published $162 billion in compliance costs ($112.66 billion in final rules) and has imposed 129.9 million in net paperwork burden hours (94.7 million from final rules). Click below for the latest Reg Rodeo findings.