Description:
As posted on the Web site the House Committee on Rules on July 16, 2012, including an amendment provided to CBO on July 19, 2012
H.R. 4078 would delay or prohibit federal agencies from taking regulatory actions in certain instances, modify the process agencies must follow for developing consent decrees and settlement agreements, and broaden the scope of analysis agencies must undertake when developing new regulations.
CBO expects that, over the 2013-2022 period, enacting H.R. 4078 would affect direct spending, and, together with the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), CBO expects that enacting the bill would affect revenues; therefore, pay-as-you-go procedures apply. However, CBO and JCT cannot estimate the sign or magnitude of those effects. Similarly, implementing H.R. 4078 would have a discretionary cost over the 2013-2017 period, but CBO cannot determine the sign or magnitude of that effect.
CBO expects that several federal and independent regulatory agencies would increase fees to offset the costs of implementing the additional regulatory activities required by the bill; thus, H.R. 4078 would increase the costs of existing mandates as defined in the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act (UMRA) on public and private-sector entities that would be required to pay those fees. Based on information from the affected regulators, CBO estimates that the additional costs of those mandates would be small and would fall well below the annual thresholds for intergovernmental and private-sector mandates established in UMRA ($73 million and $146 million in 2012, respectively, adjusted annually for inflation).
