2011: The Year in Regulation Executive Summary

Executive orders, congressional attempts to rescind rules, and a flood of novel rulemakings made 2011 the year of regulation. 

In 2010, the administration published 82,480 pages of regulations, passed two comprehensive legislative packages (the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank), and scheduled to regulate greenhouse gases (GHG) for the first time in history.  In 2011, the President attempted to preempt critics of his regulatory state when he signed Executive Order (EO) 13563, which reaffirmed many of the principles in President Clinton’s EO 12866, and called for a retrospective analysis of “outdated, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome” regulations.  He followed EO 13563 with EO 13579, a request that independent agencies conduct the same review.

Agencies responded with a series of retrospective review plans.  In 2011, agencies finalized $187 million in deregulatory actions, and proposed more than $1.1 billion in rescissions.  The largest regulatory measure, CMS’s “Reform of Hospital and Critical Access,” could save $942 million and 9.6 million hours, but the action will not become final until 2012.

These deregulatory measures, however, were dwarfed by the new regulations that the administration published this year.  For proposed or final rules, the administration published $231.4 billion in regulatory burdens and 133 million paperwork burden hours.  Assuming a 2,000 hour work year, it would take 66,730 employees just to file federal paperwork. 

In addition, more than 20.3 million of those hours had no associated cost estimate.  Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) mean hourly wage for federal “compliance officer” of $29.88, the unassociated labor costs of federal regulations actually total $608.41 million.  Thus, the total published regulatory burden for 2011 is closer to $232 billion.

Here is a snapshot of the most expensive regulations in 2011:

Methodology: This year the Forum tracked approximately 7,000 proposed and final rules.  For each entry in the Federal Register we determined if the regulation contained a private-sector cost, a burden on state or local governments, or paperwork reporting requirements.  The Forum recorded those burdens in our database.  For proposed rules that became final in 2011, the Forum noted the total costs of the final rule and omitted any earlier burdens from the proposed rule.  Generally, Federal Register entries contained only annualized costs but for larger regulatory overhauls where compliance takes several years, the Forum recorded total programmatic costs, if the agency provided those estimates.  Occasionally, the Forum catalogued notable rulemakings under Dodd-Frank, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), and other impactful federal programs.  The Forum recorded these rules even though they did not contain cost estimates or paperwork requirements.  The methodology for the Dodd-Frank and PPACA databases is the same but some rulemakings date back to 2010.