Week in Regulation

$66 Million in Regulatory Costs

Total costs were modest this week, with $66 million in burdens, compared to $42 million in annualized costs and $334 million in benefits. Thanks to a Department of Education (ED) proposal, paperwork accelerated by more than 3.6 million hours. One Dodd-Frank proposal contained minor burdens.

Regulatory Toplines

  • New Proposed Rules: 49
  • New Final Rules: 55
  • 2015 Significant Documents: 947
  • 2015 Total Pages of Regulation: 29,936
  • 2015 Proposed Rules: $24.9 Billion
  • 2015 Final Rules: $42.1 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.

In its “Program Integrity and Improvement” proposal, ED aims to amend the “cash management” rules for student aid. The goal of the rule is to help students, but this comes with a cost. ED estimates $21 million in annual burdens and more than 3.5 million paperwork hours. If approved, ED would impose the largest amount of paperwork in the agency’s history. Most of these costs would fall directly to colleges and universities already laboring under increased regulations.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) proposed a rule to cover novelty motorcycle helmets and set dimensional and compression requirements for all helmets. Costs of the proposal are minimal and the agency estimates that benefits could exceed $300 million.     

Affordable Care Act

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 164.8 million annual paperwork hours.

Dodd-Frank

The Treasury Department proposed a measure to regulate transactions “involving national banks and Federal savings associations.” These changes implement section 612 of Dodd-Frank. The agency estimates costs of more than $17 million or $15,400 per entity.

Click here to view the total estimated revised costs from Dodd-Frank; since passage, the legislation has produced more than 65.8 million paperwork burden hours and imposed $33.4 billion in direct compliance costs. Based on calculations assuming a 2,000-hour work year, Dodd-Frank regulations would require 32,900 employees to file federal paperwork annually.

Total Burdens

Since January 1, the federal government has published $67 billion in compliance costs ($42.1 billion in final rules) and has imposed 26.9 million in net paperwork burden hours (5.8 million from final rules). Click below for the latest Reg Rodeo findings.

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