CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

The Federal Register passed the 30,000-page mark on Friday, at least by unadjusted page count. After accounting for skips and blank pages, the adjusted count, which this series tracks, stands at a still-impressive 29,967 pages, and will shoot past 30,000 pages on Tuesday.

On to the data:

• Last week, 66 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 77 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 33 minutes.
• So far in 2014, 1,290 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,225 new regulations this year. This would be the lowest total in decades; this will likely change as the year goes on.
• Last week, 1,397 new pages were added to the Federal Register.
• Currently at 29,967 pages, the 2014 Federal Register is on pace for 74,918 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. Seventeen such rules have been published so far this year, one of them in the past week.
• The total estimated compliance costs of 2014’s economically significant regulations currently ranges from $1.77 billion to $2.14 billion. They also affect several billion dollars of government spending.
• One hundred and ten final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2014, 254 new rules affect small businesses; 36 of them are classified as significant.

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• This week’s economically significant rule comes from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The rule says nary a word about compliance costs, so I am scoring it as zero-cost for our running compliance cost tally. But it does claim to save more than $1.6 billion in government spending over the period 2015-24 in the Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D programs.
• The EPA revised its standards for venting refrigerants.
• The EPA also issued air quality regulations for California, Idaho,  Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Oregon.
• Implementation of the U.S.-Panama Trade Promotion Agreement continues.
• Advantame is now allowed as a food additive.
• The southern white rhino is now a threatened species.

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