EPA asked to keep collecting from 131,410 firms it told OMB will be 255.

Start with what an information collection request is, because the whole finding is in the gap between two parts of one form. Under the Paperwork Reduction Act an agency must ask OMB for permission to make the public fill anything in, and must state how many people will do it, for how long, and at what cost. EPA’s permission for PFAS reporting expires on 30 November 2026 — 17 days from today — so it has asked for an extension. The front of the request is the live programme: “Respondents/affected entities: Non-exempt manufacturers (including importers) of PFAS in any year since January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2022,” “Respondent’s obligation to respond: Mandatory” under 15 U.S.C. 2607(a)(7), 131,410 of them, 3,878,744 hours, $281 million, form 9600-046, frequency once. The back of it is a forecast of the programme’s own destruction: 255 firms, 1,461 reports, 3.4 million hours gone. Comments close 14 December 2026. Signed Courtney Kerwin, Deputy Director, Data and Enterprise Programs Division.

Divide one half of the form by the other and you get the only published price in American PFAS compliance. $281,000,000 ÷ 67,548 reports is $4,160.0047 a report; 3,878,744 ÷ 67,548 is 57.4220 hours a report; and $281,000,000 ÷ 3,878,744 is $72.4461 an hour. Per firm it is 29.5164 hours and $2,138.35. No consultancy publishes a rate card for this work. The United States does, in a table nobody reads, in a document whose purpose is to ask permission for a form.

Now the rule that is supposed to delete it. 90 FR 50923, PFAS Data Reporting and Recordkeeping Under TSCA; Revision to Regulation, docket EPA-HQ-OPPT-2020-0549, RIN 2070-AL29, signed by Administrator Lee Zeldin and published 13 November 2025, proposes six exemptions: a de minimis concentration exemption for reportable PFAS “below a 0.1% de minimis concentration,” an exemption for “PFAS imported as part of an article,” and exemptions for byproducts, impurities, R&D quantities and non-isolated intermediates. Its own Regulatory Flexibility Act section estimates that 127,469 small article importers — 97.0003% of the 131,411 — “would no longer be subject to the regulation,” and scores total savings at “a cost savings of $786-$843 million.” Comments closed 29 December 2025. Three hundred and sixty-five days later there is no final rule.

And the clock is not waiting for it. 91 FR 18786, effective 13 April 2026, amended 40 CFR 705.20 so that the submission period “shall begin January 31, 2027, or 60 days following the date provided in paragraph (c),” whichever comes first, running six months for most reporters and twelve for small manufacturers reporting only as article importers. EPA’s stated reason is that it “needs additional time to address these comments” and that tying the start to the later action “will ensure EPA does not need to later readjust the start of the submission period.” Read the mechanism rather than the intention: 31 January 2027 is a backstop, not a target, so the period opens in 79 days under the rule as it is written, and the rule as it is written binds 131,411 firms.

Here is the non-consensus reading. Every alert, tracker and white paper on this subject for twelve months has said the same thing: EPA is gutting the PFAS rule, the deadline keeps slipping, wait for the final rule. The filings say the opposite in two places. First, the exemption is an expectation — the word in the notice is “expects” — and an agency expectation is not a safe harbour a general counsel can rely on when the duty is mandatory under a statute. Second, the agency has just asked OMB to renew authority to collect from 131,410 respondents in the same document in which it says it will exempt 99.8060% of them. The billable work in the next eleven weeks is not the filing. It is the scope determination: telling a manufacturer, on paper, whether it is one of the 255 or one of the 131,156 that got out — a question that the 131,411 all have and only EPA’s unwritten rule can answer.

The door is almost nothing, and that is verifiable rather than asserted. 40 CFR 700.45, the TSCA fee schedule, prices a premanufacture notice at $37,000 ($6,480 small business), an EPA-initiated risk evaluation at $4,287,000 and a manufacturer-requested one at $2,829,847 in initial payments — and charges nothing at all for any reporting under TSCA section 8. Registration on EPA’s Central Data Exchange carries no published fee. There is no licence, no examination, no bond and no registry. The only cash this route demands is the entity that stands between the operator and the advice: a Delaware certificate of formation at “a fee in the amount of $70” under 6 Del. C. § 18-1105(a)(3) plus the $400 annual tax under § 18-1107(b) — $470, 94% of a $500 budget, $30 left, and $0 of it paid to the regulator whose programme this is.

The target arithmetic is unusually clean because the government supplied the price. $5,000 a month kept after 2026 federal tax — single filer, sole proprietor, standard deduction $16,100, self-employment tax at the 15.3% rate on 92.35% of profit, no section 199A deduction assumed — needs profit of $78,212.05: self-employment tax $11,051.01, income tax $7,161.04, an effective 23.2855%. Add the $400 Delaware tax and the fee requirement is $78,612.05, which at EPA’s own $4,160.0047 a report is 18.8971 reports a year — 1.2934% of the 1,461 that EPA says will remain — or 1,085.11 hours at its own implied $72.4461, which is 52.1688% of a 2,080-hour year and 20.8675 hours a week. That is the whole ladder: half a working year, at the rate the United States printed.

And this is where the branch at 31 January 2027 stops being a date and becomes the business. The proposal’s own Paperwork Reduction Act section puts the post-revision national burden at 134,004 hours a year. Today’s notice, subtracting 3.4 million from 3,878,744, implies 478,744 — 3.5726 times as much, two EPA documents disagreeing by a factor of three and a half about the same programme on the same docket. Take the smaller, because this series takes the base case: 134,004 hours is $9,708,071.48 at the implied rate, and divided by one operator’s 1,085.11 it supports 123.4934 people at this income nationally. Under the unrevised rule the same arithmetic supports 3,574.5156. One unfinished rule is the difference between a market for 123 operators and a market for 3,574 — 28.9450× — and on today’s evidence nobody knows which one opens in 79 days.