CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

After a slow start to the year, regulations are now coming out at their usual pace, with nearly 80 rules last week. The Federal Register will likely exceed 20,000 pages this week.

On to the data:

• Last week, 79 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 64 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 8 minutes.
• So far in 2014, 809 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,112 new regulations this year. This would be the lowest total in decades; this will likely change as the year goes on.
• Last week, 1,134 new pages were added to the Federal Register.
• Currently at 18,961 pages, the 2014 Federal Register is on pace for 72,927 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. 10 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 currently ranges from $1.05 billion to $1.34 billion. They also affect several billion dollars of government spending.
• Seventy-three final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2014, 174 new rules affect small businesses; 24 of them are classified as significant.

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• The Agricultural Marketing Service is loosening some of its restrictions for exporting apples to Canada in bulk.
• Another Dodd-Frank regulation hit the books, this one concerning retaliation procedures for whistleblowers. Passed in 2010, Dodd-Frank is currently about halfway to full implementation.
• If you are a government employee who receives gifts from foreigners, the General Service Administration has revised how you should calculate the value of those gifts.
• Visa restrictions on visitors from Chile have been relaxed somewhat.
• The federal government has a National Watermelon Promotion Board. On Monday, it revised its membership requirements.
• In a bit of good news, the island night lizard was removed from the endangered species list.

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