Week in Regulation

Delays, Stays and Revisions

This past week marked one of the busier deregulatory weeks in terms of agency actions. Such measures took various approaches to relieving regulatory costs, from delaying or staying compliance dates to revising reporting requirements. Between both proposed and final rulemakings, agencies published roughly half a billion in net total savings and more than 2 million fewer hours of paperwork. The per capita regulatory burden for 2017 is $284.

Regulatory Toplines

  • New Proposed Rules: 25
  • New Final Rules: 57
  • 2017 Total Pages of Regulation: 52,072
  • 2017 Final Rules: $32.7 Billion
  • 2017 Proposed Rules: $58.3 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 of final rules (a change from earlier versions) will help to determine which sectors of the economy receive the highest number of regulatory actions.

Tracking Regulatory Modernization

There were two notable actions providing agencies with bankable “outs” under Executive Order 13,771. The first rule, from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), adjusts certain reporting requirements to save affected entities roughly $146 million and 2 million hours of paperwork. These figures are even more notable considering how CMS originally only estimated savings of $45 million and 620,896 hours in the proposed version.

The second rule, from the Occupational Safety and Hazard Administration (OSHA), extends a certification requirement for crane operators. The extension provides roughly $5 million in annualized regulatory relief while OSHA works “to complete a related rulemaking to address issues with its existing Cranes and Derricks in Construction standard.”

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also provided an updated estimate on its proposed stay of a rule regulating oil and gas wells that could bring $280 million ($100 million annualized) in cost savings. However, EPA will have to finalize it before counting it towards the agency’s “regulatory budget” for Fiscal Year 2018

Click here to view the administration’s progress under the “one-in, two-out” executive order through the end of Fiscal Year 2017 (which ended on September 30).

Affordable Care Act

Since passage, based on total lifetime costs of the regulations, the Affordable Care Act has imposed costs of $53 billion in final state and private-sector burdens and 176.9 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 $38.9 billion in direct compliance costs.

Total Burdens

Since January 1, the federal government has published $91 billion in compliance costs ($32.7 billion in final rules) and has cut 20.3 million paperwork burden hours (due to 24.6 million in reductions from final rules). Click below for the latest Reg Rodeo findings.

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