business regulations under obama

Agencies under U.S. President Barack Obama will add thousands of new regulations to U.S. business in 2013, with many of them extremely costly.

According to Small Businesses for Sensible Regulations, an arm of the nonprofit, nonpartisan National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), more than 4,100 new Obama regulations are in the pipeline.

The group estimates that the 13 most expensive regulations will cost the U.S. economy $515 billion.

Held back during the heat of the presidential campaign, a backlog of these Obama regulations is about to hit the economy full force.

"The Obama administration has been quietly postponing several multibillion-dollar regulations until after the November election," wrote Sen. Rob Portman, R-OH, in an August Wall Street Journal guest column. "Those delayed rules, together with more than 130 unfinished mandates under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial law, could significantly increase the regulatory drag on our economy in 2013."

Portman dubbed the situation "the regulatory cliff," a reference to the widely discussed fiscal cliff.