A lot happened this week, but regulators didn’t promulgate many notable federal rules. With President-elect Trump, however, there stands to be a surge in midnight regulations from the Obama Administration. In addition to tracking what is published in the Federal Register, these weekly posts will also serve to track regulations going to and leaving OIRA during the next three months.

This week regulators only published $37 million in costs, with slightly more than 410,000 paperwork burden hours. A flood insurance rule and a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proxy rule led the week. There were no monetized benefits. The per capita regulatory burden for 2016 is $607.

Regulatory Toplines

• New Proposed Rules: 39
• New Final Rules: 47
• 2016 Total Pages of Regulation: 79,380
• 2016 Final Rules: $148.26 Billion
• 2016 Proposed Rules: $48.5 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 Department of Treasury proposed a rule for private flood insurance. The joint measure would implement provisions of the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act. It imposes costs of $36 million, but adds more than 400,000 paperwork burden hours.

The SEC proposed its proxy rule to require the use of universal proxies in all non-exempt solicitations. Proxies would be required to include the names of both the registrant and dissident nominees. The costs of the proposal are minimal, with approximately 1,000 burden hours.

Tracking Midnight Regulation

This week, OIRA received only four new regulations; all but one were final rules and none were economically significant. It does not appear that the election results triggered an immediate flood of rules into or out of OIRA. It discharged five regulations, including one economically significant measure (efficiency standards for ceiling fans). The day after the election, the administration did conclude review on a rule regulating oil and gas rights, but it had already been under review for 90 days.

Affordable Care Act

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 172.4 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 $36.5 billion in direct compliance costs.

Total Burdens

Since January 1, the federal government has published $196.8 billion in compliance costs ($147.26 billion in final rules) and has imposed 129.8 million in net paperwork burden hours (100.75 million from final rules). Click below for the latest Reg Rodeo findings.