CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

It was a busy week with more than 80 new regulations. This coming week, the number of new regulations on the year should top 1,000, and the Federal Register’s page count will top 22,000.

On to the data:

• Last week, 84 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 59 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation precisely every 2 hours.
• So far in 2014, 952 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,173 new regulations this year. This would be the lowest total in decades; this will likely change as the year goes on.
• Last week, 1,254 new pages were added to the Federal Register.
• Currently at 21,981 pages, the 2014 Federal Register is on pace for 73,270 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. 12 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 $1.64 billion to $2.01 billion. They also affect several billion dollars of government spending.
• Eighty final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2014, 196 new rules affect small businesses; 27 of them are classified as significant.

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• If you have a mechanical power press, be aware of new recordkeeping requirements from OSHA.
• The federal government owns a $350 million Legal Services Corporation, which provides legal services to people who can’t afford it. It established new restrictions on its services for aliens.
• Eleven new EPA regulations, mostly having to do with air quality plans in various states.
• Implementation of the Basel III capital reserve standards for banks continues.
• The FDA set the maximum acceptable dose of crustacean irradiation at 6.0 kiloGray. Irradiating food kills off food-borne pathogens that could make people sick.
• The FDA also reclassified stair-climbing wheelchairs from class III to class II devices.

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