The “Clean Power Plan” and a Dodd-Frank rule on margin requirements for swaps led another pricey week in regulation. Total regulatory costs eclipsed $17.4 billion, with $8.6 billion in annual burdens and $42 billion in monetized benefits. Even though EPA published a deregulatory measure, the agency still managed to impose net costs of $12.2 billion. The per capita regulatory burden for 2015 is $543.           

Regulatory Toplines

• New Proposed Rules: 48
• New Final Rules: 80
• 2015 Total Pages of Regulation: 64,660
• 2015 Proposed Rules: $88.5 Billion
• 2015 Final Rules: $86.2 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.

After a wait of more than 80 days, EPA finally published the official version of the Clean Power Plan. As AAF detailed here, the agency expects coal generation to decline by 48 percent. The $8.4 billion in compliance costs will help to close more than 60 power plants across the nation. By postponing the initial compliance date by two years, regulatory costs declined slightly, but paperwork more than doubled, compared to the proposed version. AAF’s map tracks which states will have the easiest and most difficult path to compliance.

On the heels of the Clean Power Plan, EPA also published a measure to reduce costs and paperwork. As AAF reviewed here, by updating its National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) to electronic reporting, the agency expects to save the economy $156 million during the next ten years and almost 200,000 paperwork hours.

Affordable Care Act

Since passage, based on total lifetime costs of the regulations, the Affordable Care Act has imposed costs of $47.9 billion in state and private-sector burdens and 165.9 million annual paperwork hours.

Dodd-Frank

A quintet of agencies finalized a rule establishing margin and capital requirements for swaps. Amazingly, the cost estimates range from a manageable $672 million annually to an otherworldly $46 billion, “depending on the specific initial margin estimate and incremental funding cost that is used to compute the estimate.” AAF used the more central figure of $5.2 billion in total costs. Still, it now stands as the most expensive Dodd-Frank rule on record.  

Click here to view the total estimated revised costs from Dodd-Frank; since passage, the legislation has produced more than 67.3 million paperwork burden hours and imposed $35.1 billion in direct compliance costs.

Total Burdens

Since January 1, the federal government has published $174.8 billion in compliance costs ($86.2 billion in final rules) and has imposed 73.2 million in net paperwork burden hours (23.7 million from final rules). Click below for the latest Reg Rodeo findings.