CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

  In a busy week, the Federal Register topped 40,000 pages, with Friday’s edition alone adding 666 pages.

On to the data:

• Last week, 63 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 79 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 40 minutes.
• So far in 2014, 1,812 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,406 new regulations this year. This would be the lowest total in decades; this will likely change as the year goes on.
• Last week, 2,370 new pages were added to the Federal Register, roughly double an average week’s output.
• Currently at 40,571 pages, the 2014 Federal Register is on pace for 76,262 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. 22 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 $7.34 billion to $10.57 billion. They also affect several billion dollars of government spending.
• 152 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2014, 336 new rules affect small businesses; 51 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• The EPA is rescinding an earlier regulation for labeling pesticide exports.
• A “nonessential experimental population” of Chinook salmon is being released in the Okanogan River sub-basin. Fishermen will not be allowed to catch them.
• New testing procedures for water heater energy efficiency.
• Truck drivers can use software to record their working hours, which are capped by regulations. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration issued a new regulation for that software.
• Both Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued rules designating critical habitat for the loggerhead sea turtle.
• The federal government is updating its National Poultry Improvement Plan.
• The FDA is reclassifying transcranial magnetic stimulators for headache relief into Class II.
• The northern Mexican gartersnake and the narrow-headed gartersnake are now threatened species.

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