The arctic temperatures closed the federal government on Tuesday, and with the holiday-shortened week, regulatory costs remained tame. Total costs were only $72 million, with $15 million in annualized burdens, and $30 million in benefits. 

Regulatory Toplines

• New Proposed Rules: 33
• New Final Rules: 40
• 2015 Significant Documents: 74
• 2015 Total Pages of Regulation: 9,358
• 2015 Proposed Rules: $1.58 Billion
• 2015 Final Rules: $14.52 Billion

The Department of Transportation published the largest regulation of the week, an “Asset Management Plan” (a management tool for highway infrastructure owners) for states. The total costs for developing these plans would eclipse $43 million, with 1,300 paperwork burden hours.

Affordable Care Act

Since passage, based on total lifetime costs of the regulations, the Affordable Care Act has imposed a cost of $43.7 billion in state and private-sector burdens and 163.6 million annual paperwork hours.

Dodd-Frank

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a rule mandating the disclosure of hedging by employees, officers, and directors. The measure implements Section 955 of Dodd-Frank and requires that for the annual proxy statement that employees or the board of directors disclose whether they are involved in hedges. The proposal costs approximately $2.5 million, with more than 19,000 paperwork burden hours.  

Click here to view the total estimated revised costs from Dodd-Frank; since passage, the legislation has produced more than 63.9 million paperwork burden hours and imposed $33 billion in direct compliance costs. Based on calculations from the Financial Services Roundtable, Dodd-Frank regulations would require 31,990 employees to file federal paperwork.

A Note on Paperwork

There were 432 notices published in the Federal Register this week. The Office of Management and Budget approved 78 paperwork requirements, increasing the paperwork burden hours by 1.7 million hours. 

There was one major change to existing paperwork requirements (defined as an hourly burden increase or decrease of 500,000 or greater). The largest increase in paperwork burden hours imposed by an information collection requirement (ICR) was one million hours from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. The largest decrease in paperwork burden hours imposed by an ICR was 223,693 hours.

Total Burdens

Since January 1, the federal government has published $16.1 billion in compliance costs and has added 1.4 million paperwork burden hours. Click here for our comprehensive database of regulations and rulemakings promulgated in 2015.