The Week in Regulation: August 29-September 2, 2011

NLRB’s union notification rule and the Department of Justice’s lawsuit in opposition to the AT&T/T-Mobile merger marked another busy week on the regulatory front.  A pricey Dodd-Frank final rule also contributed to the weekly regulatory burden of $751.4 million and 13.1 million compliance hours.

Administrative agencies proposed 45 rules and implemented 72 final rules.  Federal agencies issued 10 new documents “deemed significant under [Executive Order] 12866,” bringing the yearly total to 426 according to the Federal Register; the federal government has issued 54,920 pages of regulations in 2011.  

With the advent of “final” agency deregulatory plans, the Forum has started to track deregulatory measures published in the Federal Register.  Our updated database now reflects regulations with a quantified cost reduction estimate.  However, with only $231 million in published rescissions, the total regulatory burden remains significant.  

NLRB published the headline-grabbing final rule this week on union notification rights, only to be trumped by Justice’s intervention in the AT&T/T-Mobile merger.  The NLRB final rule could easily impose more than $386 million in costs for businesses and more than 12 million compliance hours. (In a bid to avoid transparency, NLRB listed this figure in footnote 212 and nowhere in their economic analysis.) 

NLRB actually mentioned the comment letter authored by Forum President Doug Holtz-Eakin.  “A joint comment submitted by Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Sam Batkins argues against the Board’s assertion of Section 6 authority here by asserting that ‘the Supreme Court has circumscribed NLRB rulemaking in the past: “The deference owed to an expert tribunal cannot be allowed to slip into a judicial inertia which results in the unauthorized assumption by an agency of major policy decisions properly made by Congress.’”  Unfortunately, NLRB argued that it did have authority to issue the rule and disregarded thousands of comments arguing otherwise.

Dodd-Frank produced a final rule from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) regulating swap data repositories.  CFTC pegged the estimated cost at $212.5 million with more than 854,000 annual paperwork burden hours. 

Click here to view the total estimated compliance costs from Dodd-Frank; since passage the legislation has produced (in proposed and enacted rules) more than 24.8 million new paperwork burden hours. 

There was no Affordable Care Act proposed or final rule this week.  Since passage the law has imposed an estimated $8.2 billion in private-sector burdens, approximately $2.2 billion in direct costs to states, and 27 million annual paperwork hours.

At the current pace, the total regulatory burden for 2011 (proposed and final) will exceed $103.6 billion.  Since January 1, the federal government has imposed more than 78.3 million annual paperwork burden hours and $69.7 billion in compliance costs. 

Click here for our comprehensive database of regulations promulgated in 2011.

Update: The White House just announced that it will suspend implementation of tighter ground-level ozone standards.  The proposed rule, published last year, could have imposed up to $90 billion in compliance costs.  More information on the announcement is here.