The regulatory pace slowed this week, with just $191 million in rulemaking burdens. Annual costs were $90 million, compared to $200,000 in benefits; paperwork increased by 1.2 million hours. A Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulation on antiseptics led the week.                     

Regulatory Toplines

• New Proposed Rules: 47
• New Final Rules: 73
• 2015 Significant Documents: 910
• 2015 Total Pages of Regulation: 25,206
• 2015 Proposed Rules: $24.7 Billion
• 2015 Final Rules: $39.4 Billion

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.

FDA proposed a rule covering over-the-counter (OTC) antiseptics. The measure would “establish conditions under which OTC antiseptic products intended for use by health care professionals in a hospital setting or other health care situations outside the hospital are generally recognized as safe.” To conduct the safety and effectiveness tests, initial costs approach $90 million, with $12 million in annualized costs during the next ten years.  

Affordable Care Act

The administration proposed a rule modifying the “Inpatient Prospective Payment System for Acute Care Hospitals,” which includes some changes from the Affordable Care Act. It would add more than 1.1 million paperwork burdens hours and the administration considers the measure a “major” rule.

Since passage, based on total lifetime costs of the regulations, the Affordable Care Act has imposed costs of $43.8 billion in state and private-sector burdens and 164.7 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 65.6 million paperwork burden hours and imposed $33.3 billion in direct compliance costs. Based on calculations from the Financial Services Roundtable, Dodd-Frank regulations would require 32,826 employees to file federal paperwork. 

Total Burdens

Since January 1, the federal government has published $64.2 billion in compliance costs ($39.48 billion in final rules) and has imposed 22.5 million in net paperwork burden hours (5.0 million from final rules). Click below for the latest Reg Rodeo findings.