Week in Regulation

Regulations Take A Holiday

Shortened by the Thanksgiving holiday, last week brought minimal regulatory activity. However, it was still a nominally deregulatory week. A mere handful of rules combined for roughly $800,000 in net cost savings and 23,375 fewer hours of paperwork. The per capita regulatory burden for 2017 is $284.

Regulatory Toplines

  • New Proposed Rules: 22
  • New Final Rules: 53
  • 2017 Total Pages of Regulation: 56,046
  • 2017 Final Rules: $33.1 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

The most notable deregulatory action of the week was a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) proposed rule. The FERC proposal would reduce certain reporting requirements by nearly 35,000 hours, producing roughly $1.7 million in savings. However, since it is from an independent agency, it would not count towards the administration’s “regulatory budget” under Executive Order 13,771.

The only notable action related to Executive Order 13,771 came from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The OSHA rule delays the compliance date of a 2016 reporting rule by five and a half months. This delay could provide savings of $147,000 overall or roughly $21,000 on an annualized basis.

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 82.9 million final paperwork burden hours and imposed $38.9 billion in direct compliance costs.

Total Burdens

Since January 1, the federal government has published $91.4 billion in compliance costs ($33.1 billion in final rules) and has cut 11.1 million paperwork burden hours (due to 15.4 million in reductions from final rules). Click below for the latest Reg Rodeo findings.

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