CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

It was a four-day work week due to Martin Luther King Day. This made for another light week on the regulatory front, with the Federal Register held under 1,000 pages for the first time since last year’s government shutdown.

On to the data:

  • Last week, 43 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 57 new final rules the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every three hours and 54 minutes.
  • So far in 2014, 164 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 2,563 new regulations this year. This would be the lowest total in decades; this will likely change as the year goes on.
  • Last week, 962 new pages were added to the Federal Register.
  • Currently at 3,456 pages, the 2014 Federal Register is on pace for exactly 54,000 pages, which would be the lowest total since 1990.
  • Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. Four such rules have been published so far this year, none of them in the past week.
  • The total estimated compliance costs of 2014’s economically significant regulations is currently $1.6 million. They also affect several billion dollars of government spending.
  • Twenty-one final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
  • So far in 2014, 29 new rules affect small businesses. Six of them are classified as significant.

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

For more data, see Ten Thousand Commandments and follow @10KC and @RegoftheDay on Twitter.