A week of nothing. Regulators took a break during the last five days, publishing just $38 million in burdens, no paperwork hours, and failing to monetize potential benefits. A Department of Labor (DOL) measure to garnish wages led the week. The per capita regulatory burden for 2015 is $490.

Regulatory Toplines

• New Proposed Rules: 53
• New Final Rules: 68
• 2015 Total Pages of Regulation: 61,272
• 2015 Proposed Rules: $88.7 Billion
• 2015 Final Rules: $68.8 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.

DOL issued an interim final rule granting the agency powers to garnish the wages of employees who owe non-tax debt. As AAF detailed previously, EPA attempted to garnish the wages of Americans last year, but due to political backlash, it eventually repealed the measure. Instead of a direct final rule that EPA issued, DOL published an interim final rule with comment period. There is a chance if the agency receives adverse comment, they could withdraw the rule as well. It’s unclear how many individuals owe the agency money or the total amount.

Beyond the DOL rule, all other quantified regulations were from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). In total, FAA rulemakings this week forecasted roughly $38 million in burdens.

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

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 $157.5 billion in compliance costs ($68.8 billion in final rules) and has imposed 71.4 million in net paperwork burden hours (22.7 million from final rules). Click below for the latest Reg Rodeo findings.