Last week marked a relatively quiet one in the realm of agency regulatory activity. There were only six rulemakings that had some measurable economic impact. None of those rules exceeded the $100 million mark in terms of estimated effects. There were, however, some other regulatory policy developments emanating from the White House and Capitol Hill. Federal agencies published roughly $80.1 million in total costs and added 114,998 paperwork burden hours.

REGULATORY TOPLINES

• Proposed Rules This Week: 22
• Final Rules This Week: 56
• 2026 Total Pages: 3,017
• 2026 Final Rule Costs: -$8.2 billion
• 2026 Proposed Rule Costs: $5.3 billion

NOTABLE REGULATORY ACTIONS

The most significant rulemaking of the week – at least in terms of calculated economic effects – was an airworthiness directive rule regarding CFM International, S.A. Engines that involves roughly $75 million in total costs. The more consequential rulemaking of the week from a broader policy perspective, however, may have been the Department of Commerce (DOC) rule on “Deep Seabed Mining: Revisions to Regulations for Exploration License and Commercial Recovery Permit Applications.” As DOC notes:

Some provisions of the regulations require updating to reflect significant technological and information changes since promulgation of the initial regulations in the 1980s. NOAA [National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration] has included a consolidated license and permit application process in a section of the regulations reserved for this purpose and has made other clarifying and conforming changes.

The agency expects these changes to yield roughly $16.5 million in total net savings to affected entities.

TRACKING TRUMP 2.0

The deep-sea mining rule discussed above represents the week’s only rulemaking that carried a designation under Executive Order (EO) 14192. In assessing 2026 rulemakings that include an EO 14192 determination (including the handful of rules published January 2), there have been 10 “deregulatory” rules with combined total savings of $8.3 billion. Adding that to the total that agencies produced during 2025 (at least from rules that had a clear “regulatory” or “deregulatory” designation), the Trump Administration has enacted $148.3 billion in total cost reductions thus far under the auspices of EO 14192.

In other EO 14192 news, the administration finally posted a more complete accounting of its actions under the EO. The American Action Forum (AAF) had some initial thoughts on the figures involved here. The supporting documentation is organized similarly to the reports released each fiscal year under the first Trump term. While this documentation provides more details on the administration’s efforts thus far – a welcome development from a transparency perspective – they also suffer from a similar deficiency as those first-term reports. There is the overall agency-by-agency topline breakdown and then the list of individual actions taken. The latter, however, does not include the costs or savings estimates ascribed to the particular line-items that make up the totals listed in the former. As such, this makes it difficult to discern the relative significance of the actions listed therein – beyond the handful included in the initial announcement last month.

CONGRESSIONAL REVIEW ACT (CRA)

There was some action on the CRA front this past week. The House passed H.J. Res 140, a resolution of disapproval that would repeal a Biden-era Department of Interior Public Land Order (PLO) regarding certain parcels of land in Minnesota. This resolution represents another novel entry in the CRA canon. While there have recently been multiple successful CRA resolutions of disapproval lodged against agency actions that fall outside the confines of traditional rulemakings, those previous actions had the imprimatur of a Government Accountability Office (GAO) determination that the underlying actions were considered “rules” for the purposes of the CRA. For the PLO addressed by H.J. Res 140, there was no such GAO determination. Assuming this resolution passes into law and survives additional judicial scrutiny, it could represent an even greater expansion of the CRA’s scope.

The AAF CRA tracker provides a full survey of activity under the law thus far into this term. As of today, members of the 119th Congress have introduced CRA resolutions of disapproval addressing 71 rulemakings across the Biden and Trump Administrations that collectively involve $138 billion in estimated compliance costs. Of these, 22 have been passed into law, repealing a series of Biden Administration rules that had a combined $3 billion in associated compliance costs. The Trump Administration estimates that the repeal of this rule yields an additional $936 million in savings. While the main window of CRA action has largely passed, there are still outstanding resolutions that could move legislatively. AAF will continue to monitor and update such developments as appropriate.

TOTAL BURDENS

Since the start of 2026, the federal government has published $2.9 billion in total regulatory net cost savings (with $8.2 billion in reductions from finalized rules) and 2.2 million hours of net annual paperwork increases (with 140,229 hours coming from final rules).