This week regulators added $95 million in total costs, $72 million in annualized burdens, and actually cut more than 100,000 paperwork burden hours. It was a slow week, with only six regulations that monetized costs or hours, but a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposal on “Food Facilities” and an EPA rulemaking on regional haze for Arkansas led the pack.                     

Regulatory Toplines

• New Proposed Rules: 37
• New Final Rules: 51
• 2015 Significant Documents: 876
• 2015 Total Pages of Regulation: 19,510
• 2015 Proposed Rules: $17.7 Billion
• 2015 Final Rules: $16.1 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.

FDA amended registration standards for “Food Facilities,” proposing to eliminate more than 135,000 paperwork burden hours. However, the cut in hours isn’t entirely a deregulatory measure. As FDA concedes, “This decrease is due to the recently reduced number of active registrations in the food facility registration database.” In other words: fewer food facilities and not less regulation.

EPA proposed a Federal Implementation Plan (FIP) for Arkansas to address regional haze and visibility. The rule applies to six facilities, in an effort to reduce SO₂ and NO_x. EPA estimates the measure could cost more than $60 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 163.5 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 $33.8 billion in compliance costs and has imposed 16 million in net paperwork burden hours. Click here for our new comprehensive database of rulemakings promulgated from 2008 to 2015.