The first full week of December fell into the same pattern of many recent weeks: modest, yet nominally deregulatory, rulemaking activity. The highlight of the week was the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) delaying the implementation of a rule on methane emissions. In terms of overall impact, agencies produced roughly $42 million of net cost savings and cut nearly 120,000 hours of paperwork. The per capita regulatory burden for 2017 is $274.

Regulatory Toplines

• New Proposed Rules: 37
• New Final Rules: 76
• 2017 Total Pages of Regulation: 57,988
• 2017 Final Rules: $30.5 Billion
• 2017 Proposed Rules: $58 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 from the week comes from BLM. BLM finalized a one-year delay of certain aspects of its 2016 rule regarding “Waste Prevention, Production Subject to Royalties, and Resource Conservation.” The delay provides $46 million in net cost savings at the expense of roughly $2 million in benefits from emission reductions. The agency is also undertaking a more complete review of the underlying rule, but will need to promulgate an entirely new rulemaking to make such substantive changes.

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 $88.6 billion in compliance costs ($30.5 billion in final rules) and has cut 10.8 million paperwork burden hours (due to 15.3 million in reductions from final rules). Click below for the latest Reg Rodeo findings.