Despite a proposal from the Department of Transportation to cut $81 million in costs, regulatory burdens still escalated this week. Annual burdens were $245 million, compared to $829 million in benefits; paperwork grew more than 2.5 million hours. EPA’s methane emissions standards for landfills led the week. The per capita regulatory burden for 2015 is $424.

Regulatory Toplines

• New Proposed Rules: 63
• New Final Rules: 73
• 2015 Total Pages of Regulation: 52,374
• 2015 Proposed Rules: $73 Billion
• 2015 Final Rules: $63 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.

As AAF outlined here, EPA proposed new methane emissions rules for fracking wells and landfills. The two proposals published this week only regulate landfills, but contain substantial costs, nonetheless. The two measures, one for solid waste landfills and one for municipal landfills, impose total costs of $57 million and contain more than 700,000 hours of paperwork.

The most expensive measure of the week was actually an EPA proposal for pesticide applicators. The proposed rule would apply to any entity that applies restricted use pesticides, including states and tribal territories. It would increase training, security, and competency standards for entities applying pesticides. The total costs could exceed $57 million, compared to $81 million in benefits. However, paperwork will increase by more than 1.8 million hours annually from roughly 1.7 million respondents nationwide.

The Department of Transportation continues to show it’s the lead deregulator in the executive branch. Its proposal to automate recordkeeping for the “Hours of Service” rules is expected to save $81 million during the next ten years and cut 194,000 hours of paperwork. In 2015, the federal government has proposed or finalized $1 billion in regulatory cuts, with 2.7 million fewer hours. Yet on net, overall burdens continue to accelerate at a record pace.

Affordable Care Act

Since passage, based on total lifetime costs of the regulations, the Affordable Care Act has imposed costs of $47 billion in state and private-sector burdens and 165.7 million annual paperwork hours.

Dodd-Frank

The Securities and Exchange Commission proposed a rule for Security-Based Swap Dealers under Dodd-Frank. However, the rule contains minor burdens: $95,000 and 251 paperwork hours.

Click here to view the total estimated revised costs from Dodd-Frank; since passage, the legislation has produced more than 67.2 million paperwork burden hours and imposed $35 billion in direct compliance costs.

Total Burdens

Since January 1, the federal government has published $136 billion in compliance costs ($63 billion in final rules) and has imposed 49.3 million in net paperwork burden hours (14.18 million from final rules). Click below for the latest Reg Rodeo findings.