CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

It was a week like any other for regulations, with rules affecting everything from olive taxes in California to what types of gasoline are legal in Atlanta.

On to the data:

• Last week, 67 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 84 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 30 minutes.
• So far in 2014, 589 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 2,945 new regulations this year. This would be the lowest total in decades; this will likely change as the year goes on.
• Last week, 1,415 new pages were added to the Federal Register.
• Currently at 14,593 pages, the 2014 Federal Register is on pace for 72,965 pages, which would be the lowest total since 2009.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. 8 such rules have been published so far this year, two of them in the past week.
• The total estimated compliance costs of 2014’s economically significant regulations currently ranges from $616 million to $887 million. They also affect several billion dollars of government spending.
• Fifty-nine final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2014, 121 new rules affect small businesses; 18 of them are classified as significant.

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• One of this week’s economically significant rules implements part of the Affordable Care Act. It will affect $62 to $69 billion of government spending over the years 2015-2017, with paperwork and compliance costs estimated at $2.35 million.
• The other economically significant rule also involves health care spending, to the tune of $17.19 billion over 2015-19. The rule specifically declines to quantify compliance costs, so I am scoring it as zero-cost in our running compliance cost tally.
• The federal government’s California Olive Committee is decreasing its assessment on olive growers from $21.16 tp $15.21 per ton of “assessable olives handled.”
• The Atlanta metro area is not required to use reformulated gasoline, according to the EPA.
• If you would like to import ecclesiastical ethnological materials from Honduras, please read this new rule from the Treasury Department and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
• Vitamin D2 is now permitted in food.
• New safety standards for carriages and strollers.

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