[Budget of the United States Government]
[VI. Investing in the Common Good: Program Performance in Federal Functions]
[32. Regulation: Costs and Be]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]


 
                   32.  REGULATION: COSTS AND BENEFITS

  Along with taxing and spending, the Federal Government makes policy 
through regulating--that is, generally, through Executive Branch actions 
to interpret or implement legislation. As with taxing and spending, the 
Administration carefully designs and implements regulations to provide 
the most public benefit for the least cost. The Office of Management and 
Budget (OMB), the White House office that sets regulatory policy, has 
adopted the following objective in its Strategic Plan: ``Maximize social 
benefits of regulation while minimizing the costs and burdens of 
regulation.''
  The Government is still learning how to accurately estimate regulatory 
costs, such as how much the private sector spends to comply with 
regulations, and benefits, such as safer cars and food. For over 20 
years, a series of Executive Orders has charged OMB with reviewing 
regulations and providing information on their costs and benefits. The 
President's September 1993 Executive Order, ``Regulatory Planning and 
Review,'' directs agencies to assess the costs and benefits of available 
regulatory alternatives and to issue only regulations that maximize net 
benefits (benefits minus costs), unless a law requires another approach.
  Developing and evaluating the best possible data on benefits and costs 
are central to the Government's ability to assess how well the 
regulatory system functions to fulfill public needs. To meet that goal, 
OMB works with the agencies to improve the quality of the data and 
analyses they use in making regulatory decisions for both proposed and 
existing regulations, and to promote the use of standardized assumptions 
and methodologies uniformly across regulatory programs.

  Difficulties in Estimation: Estimating regulatory costs and benefits 
is hard for two reasons: the ``baseline'' problem and the ``apples and 
oranges'' problem.
  To estimate how regulations affect society and the economy, the 
Government must determine the baseline against which to measure costs 
and benefits; that is, what would have happened if the Government had 
not issued the regulation? But, several problems arise. First, no one 
can craft such a hypothetical baseline with certainty. Second, measures 
of costs and benefits often vary, depending on who is measuring. 
Agencies generally support their regulatory programs and, thus, may 
understate costs or overstate the likely benefits; at the same time, 
businesses and others who bear the costs will likely do the opposite. 
Third, the timing of estimates also may make a difference. Most 
estimates are made before the regulation takes effect, but evidence 
exists that once regulations are in place, the affected entities find 
less costly ways to comply.
  The ``apples and oranges'' problem derives from the nature and 
diversity of regulation itself. Over 60 Federal agencies regulate over 
4,000 times a year for a wide array of public purposes. The Government 
must make decisions about the chemical composition and temperature of 
the atmosphere, the accessibility of public transportation, and safety 
of the Nation's food supply. Estimating the costs of such diverse 
activities is hard; estimating the benefits is even harder. Fortunately, 
the Government is working on this issue and is making steady progress on 
methodology and data collection.

  Costs and Benefits of Regulation: A recent OMB survey, Report to 
Congress on the Costs and Benefits of Federal Regulations, presents 
estimates of the aggregate costs and benefits of Federal regulation, as 
well as the costs and benefits of major individual regulations issued in 
the last year. Despite the inherent problems, the report represents a 
good first step toward developing a system to track OMB and agency 
performance in minimizing costs while achieving social benefits.
  The report uses information on costs and benefits that was published 
in peer-reviewed journals, or published for public comment by agencies 
and reviewed by OMB, to estimate aggregate costs and benefits for four 
cat

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egories: environmental, other social, economic, and paperwork/disclosure 
(see Table 32-1).
   The estimates in Table 32-1 are very rough, particularly the benefit 
estimates. With that very important caveat, the numbers indicate that 
regulation has produced as much, if not more, in benefits as in costs, 
and that environmental and other social regulation, mainly health and 
safety regulation, has clearly produced benefits significantly greater 
than compliance costs.
   The benefits of environmental regulations reflect the value that 
society places on improved health, recreational opportunities, quality 
of life, preservation of ecosystems, biodiversity, and so on. The 
benefits of other social regulation include the value attributed to 
reduced mortality and morbidity. Generally, the costs are the expenses 
incurred in compliance, based on engineering designs and current prices, 
although sometimes they properly include the opportunity costs of 
foregoing the benefits of what would have been produced in the absence 
of the regulation.
  Economic regulation directly restricts business' ability to conduct 
its main economic activities--to set prices and decide what to produce. 
It may also limit business' ability to enter or leave certain lines of 
work. These regulations usually apply on an industry basis, such as 
agriculture, trucking, or communications. Often, economic regulation has 
protected business from competition, and economic loss comes from the 
higher prices and inefficiencies that result when competition is 
restricted. Sometimes, however, as in the case of natural monopolies, 
economic regulation simulates competition and, thus, produces benefits 
to consumers. Because the Government has no reliable quantitative 
estimates of the benefits of economic regulation, Table 32-1 includes 
none. Most economists, however, believe that because regulatory policy 
has been slow to adapt to rapidly changing technology, the costs of 
economic regulation have generally exceeded the benefits. The Federal 
Government has been deregulating key sectors of the economy over the 
past 20 years, and many other countries have followed its lead.
  The fourth category, paperwork/disclosure, includes regulations 
requiring that information be disclosed about the characteristics of an 
economic transaction--e.g., financial, securities, and business 
transactions--so that both parties to the transaction will have the same 
information. Although the Government has no reliable estimates of the 
benefits of such disclosure, most economists believe that benefits 
exceed costs.
  Although Table 32-1 shows that, in total and for important categories, 
Federal regulations have provided more benefits than costs, it says 
little about current regulatory policy or how to improve it. To address 
these issues, the Government needs estimates of the costs and benefits 
of the incremental changes to recent regulations. In its report,

  ----------------------------------------------------------------------

    Table 32-1.  Estimates of the Total Annual Benefits and Costs of    
                          Regulations for 1997                          
                      (In billions of 1996 dollars)                     
------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                   Benefits      Costs  
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Environmental...................................         162         144
Other Social....................................         136          54
Economic........................................           *          71
Paperwork/disclosure............................           *          10
                                                 -----------------------
  Total.........................................        >298         279
------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Indicates that significant benefits remain to be quantified including 
  the benefits of regulating local phone monopolies and the information 
  disclosure requirements of the banking and capital market regulatory  
  agencies. Note that financial safety and soundness regulation is not  
  included in the above totals.                                         
                                                                        
Source: OMB, Report to Congress On the Costs and Benefits of Federal    
  Regulations, September 30, 1997.                                      

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OMB provided information on the costs and benefits of the 41 
economically significant final regulations that it reviewed from April 
1, 1996 to March 31, 1997. 1
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  \1\ For a copy of this report, see the web site http://
www.whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP/OMB/html/rcongress.htm.
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  Twenty-one of these rules require substantial private sector spending, 
provide significant new social benefits, or both. The Environmental 
Protection Agency (EPA) issued seven of these rules; the Agriculture 
Department (USDA) issued four; the Health and Human Services (HHS) and 
Transportation Departments each issued three; and the remaining four 
were spread among the Commerce, Interior (DOI), and Labor (DOL) 
Departments.
  For seven of the 21 rules, monetized benefits exceeded costs. For 
example, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) estimated that its 
tobacco rule would provide net benefits of $9 billion to $10.2 billion a 
year. EPA estimated that its Accidental Release Prevention rule would 
generate $77 million a year in net benefits. For the remaining 15 rules, 
agencies did not provide enough information to estimate monetized net 
benefits. For five of the 15, the agencies quantified the expected 
benefits (e.g., tons of emissions reduced, number of injuries avoided), 
but they did not assign dollar values to these effects and, thus, could 
not calculate monetized net benefits. For five others, the agencies 
identified qualitative benefits associated with the rule, but did not 
develop any quantified estimates of the likely effects. For the 
remaining five, agencies had very little economic data on the effects of 
the rule.
  Of the remaining economically significant final rules, 19 were needed 
to implement Federal budget programs. These rules generally create 
``transfers''--that is, payments from one group to another, such as from 
the Federal Government to beneficiaries, that redistribute wealth. Eight 
were USDA rules to implement Federal laws on agricultural and Food Stamp 
policies; seven were HHS and Social Security Administration rules to 
implement Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security policy; two were 
Department of Housing and Urban Development rules linked to Federal 
mortgage protections; one was a DOL rule tied to Federal service 
contracts; and one was a joint HHS-Treasury-DOL rule setting standards 
for health insurance portability group health plans.
  In the most basic case, transfers do not directly impose social costs 
or create social benefits, and do not reflect the ``opportunity cost'' 
of resources used or benefits foregone. Thus, OMB did not include 
transfers in Table 32-1 estimates of costs and benefits. Nevertheless, 
transfers can have important effects on the distribution of income. They 
may cause indirect social costs because they must be financed--for 
example, by income and payroll taxes--in ways that affect the use of 
real income. Similarly, transfers may generate social benefits if 
beneficiaries realize marginal benefits from the payments that are 
greater than the losses for taxpayers who finance them.

  Further Action: The Government needs better data and analysis to 
determine whether proposed regulations maximize social benefits while 
minimizing cost. But agencies have legitimate reasons for their often 
incomplete estimates. In some cases, they face significant technical 
problems in assessing costs and benefits. In others, legal or judicial 
deadlines force the agencies to act within time frames that do not allow 
for adequate analysis. In still others, agencies may need to allocate 
their limited financial and human resources to higher priorities. 
Finally, in cases of emergencies, the public expects its elected leaders 
to respond without the delay that careful analysis would entail.
  OMB is committed to improving the indicators to assess its performance 
in meeting the goal of ensuring that it is faithfully executing and 
managing regulatory policy. It will lead an inter-agency effort to raise 
the quality of analyses that agencies use in developing regulations, 
such as by offering technical outreach programs and training sessions on 
using OMB's ``Best Practices'' on economic analysis.
  OMB also will:
   subject a select set of agency regulatory analyses to peer 
          review in order to identify--based on actual experience--the 
          methodological approaches that need im

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          provement and to stimulate the development of better 
          estimation techniques;
   continue to develop a database on benefits and costs of major 
          rules, using consistent assumptions and better estimation 
          techniques to refine agency estimates of incremental costs and 
          benefits; and
   work on developing appropriate methodologies to evaluate 
          whether to reform or eliminate existing regulatory programs or 
          their elements.
  Regulation and regulatory reform can do much good for society, 
depending on whether the Government has the needed information and 
analysis for wise decision-making. The steps outlined above are designed 
to continue the Government's efforts to improve its ability to make 
better regulatory decisions.