Week in Regulation

A Modest Election Week Set of Regulations: November 3-7

Tuesday’s elections saw a major shift in the balance of Congress. However, there were relatively few actions of note amongst administrative agencies. In total, regulators published more than $260 million in compliance costs and 800,000 hours of paperwork against $225 million in benefits. Amended railroad safety standards and the implementation of Veterans Affairs (VA) reform led the week.

Regulatory Toplines

  • New Proposed Rules: 31
  • New Final Rules: 59
  • 2014 Significant Documents: 554
  • 2014 Total Pages of Regulation: 66,515
  • 2014 Proposed Rules: $79.4 Billion
  • 2014 Final Rules: $78.3 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.

On Wednesday, VA published an interim final rule that implemented certain reforms from The Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act of 2014. The new rule allows veterans currently waiting for care to seek compensated care from non-VA providers. While it is an important reform that will help avoid some of the delayed care issues highlighted earlier this year, the new rule does come with more than 750,000 hours of new paperwork.

Affordable Care Act

Since passage, based on total lifetime costs of the regulations, the Affordable Care Act has imposed costs of $40 billion in state and private-sector burdens and 162.1 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 63.8 million paperwork burden hours and imposed $32.7 billion in direct compliance costs. Based on calculations from the Financial Services Roundtable, Dodd-Frank regulations would require 31,940 employees to file federal paperwork.

A Note on Paperwork

This week, federal agencies published 448 notices and the Office of Management and Budget approved 61 paperwork requirements, increasing the total paperwork burden by 10.1 million hours.

There were two major changes, which are defined as hourly increases or decreases of 500,000 or greater, which added to the surge. While the Department of Education posted a 6.9 million rise in paperwork burden, the Department of Homeland Security recorded a hike of 1.9 million.

At the same time, total costs associated with all the burdens fell by $33,900. The drop was caused mostly by a decrease of $554,400 posted by the Department of Commerce.

Total Burdens

Since January 1, the federal government has published $157.6 billion in compliance costs and has imposed 34.5 million in net paperwork burden hours. Click here for our comprehensive database of regulations and rulemakings promulgated in 2014.

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