Energy efficiency regulations and the PATRIOT Act are another billion-dollar week

If the regulatory front seems busy lately, that’s because it is. You have to go back about two months to find a week’s worth of recipe creation that wasn’t measured in the billions of dollars. Last week was a continuation of this trend. Last week, 11 pieces of legislation were adopted that had a measurable economic impact, and three of them exceeded the billion-dollar mark. The highlights of the week were two final regulations from the Department of Energy (DOE) establishing efficiency standards and a proposed rule imposing certain verification and reporting requirements on “investment advisers.” Across all regulatory processes, agencies published total costs of $7.3 billion and added 4.6 million hours of paperwork per year.

REGULATORY TOPICS

• Proposed rules: 31
• Final rules: 59
• 2024 Total number of pages: 45,959
• Final rule costs for 2024: $1.2 trillion
• Proposed regulations for 2024 Costs: $36.3 billion

IMPORTANT REGULATORY ACTIONS

A pair of DOE performance standards represented the most consistent action of the week. The first focuses on “air-cooled commercial air conditioners and heat pumps” and brings in a total of almost $4.6 billion for “Consumer Incremental Product Costs.” Following a trend noted here previously, this rule has become an “immediate final rule” based on apparent consensus among relevant stakeholders. At the same time, DOE published a proposed companion rule. The second set of standards focused on circulation pumps and resulted in approximately $1.2 billion in total costs. This rule was implemented through the more traditional proposed-to-final rulemaking route.

The week’s other billion-dollar piece of legislation was a joint proposal by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and the Securities and Exchange Commission for “Customer Identification Programs for Registered Investment Advisors and Exempt Reporting Advisors.” Under the ostensible statutory auspices of the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, better known as the “PATRIOT Act,” the proposed rule would require “investment advisers to implement reasonable procedures to verify the identity of their clients.” ” The agencies estimate the compliance burden of this proposal to be 3.8 million hours of paperwork and $453 million in associated costs annually. Over the course of three years, during which all formal requirements will be formally met, this will amount to a total of almost USD 1.4 billion.

ADMINISTRATION TRACKING

As we have already seen from executive orders and memos, the Biden administration will certainly provide many contrasts with the Trump administration on the regulatory front. And while the current administration is generally expected to pursue a broad restoration of Obama-style regulatory actions, there will also be areas where it charts its own course. Because AAF RegRodeo data goes back to 2005, it is possible to provide weekly updates on how President Biden’s key regulatory record trends align with those of his last two predecessors. The table below shows the cumulative totals of the final regulations containing the measurable economic impact of each administration up to this point on the respective dates.With the set of DOE-developed performance standards discussed above, the costs of the Biden-era final rule increased by another $5.9 billion. Given the scale of the total so far, $5.9 billion is now somewhat of a rounding error. Nevertheless, the directional trend remains the same as it has been overall in recent weeks. Among the other administrations discussed here, the only noticeable change was in the Trump administration’s total document volume, which was 3.7 million hours. The main reason for this increase was the Trump-era Department of Education policy on “nondiscrimination on the basis of sex in educational programs or activities receiving federal financial assistance.”

TOTAL LOADS

Since January 1, the federal government has published $1.23 trillion in total net costs (including $1.2 trillion in new costs resulting from the final regulations) and 47.7 million hours of net annual increases in paperwork workload (of which 15.7 million hours are due to from the final regulations).