The Week in Regulation: July 25-29, 2011

The pace of regulatory growth slowed slightly this week but costs still accelerated by $143.4 million.  Several Dodd-Frank rulemakings contributed to more than 505,000 additional paperwork burden hours on small businesses and individuals.

This week administrative agencies proposed 57 rules and implemented 82 final rules.  The number of “significant” documents increased by 16, bringing the yearly total to 364 according to the Federal Register; the federal government has issued 45,652 pages of regulations in 2011.  

As usual, there were a flood of new Dodd-Frank rulemakings, eight, including four from the newly-formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  However, only one contained a quantified cost estimate; the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's (CFTC) review of swaps for mandatory clearing is projected to impose 480 annual paperwork burden hours, at a cost of $48,000. 

CFTC also issued a final rule regulating designated contract markets, derivatives, swap execution facilities, and swap data repositories.  And although CFTC projected an annual paperwork burden of more than 14,000 hours, it did not quantify these costs.  Based on CFTC’s previous per-hour labor rate of $100, a conservative cost estimate for the final rule is $1.4 million.

This week the most expensive regulatory item was the Food Safety and Inspection Service’s proposed rule governing raw meat and poultry.   One measure of the proposal would “remove the standard of identity regulation for ‘ready-to-cook poultry products to which solutions are added.’”  The Service estimates a $73 million central cost estimate and 61,000 annual paperwork burden hours.

Finally, this week the federal government implemented $143.4 million in additional regulatory burdens.  At the current pace, the total regulatory burden for the year will exceed $105.6 billion, with approximately 900 major regulations.  To date, the federal government has piled on more than 41.6 million annual paperwork burden hours, or roughly 4,751 years of compliance. 

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