CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

What started off as a slow week ended with a bang, with 31 final regulations and 20 proposed regulations appearing in Friday’s Federal Register.

On to the data:

Last week, 74 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 100 new final rules the previous week.
That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 16 minutes.
So far in 2014, 1,986 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,472 new regulations this year. This would be the lowest total in decades; this will likely change as the year goes on.
Last week, 1,409 new pages were added to the Federal Register.
Currently at 43,539 pages, the 2014 Federal Register is on pace for 76,118 pages. This 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. Twenty-two 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.
One-hundred and sixty-two final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
So far in 2014, 366 new rules affect small businesses; 56 of them are classified as significant.

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

Spearmint oil producers in the Western United States will be delighted to find a decreased assessment rate on their product from the Agricultural Marketing Service. In all, federal agencies have issued 140 spearmint oil regulations since 1995.
The FAA is extending the comment period for model aircraft regulations through September 23.
Amid all the uproar about health insurance exchanges in the last week, HHS issued corrections to earlier insurance exchange regulations.
The Zuni bluehead sucker, a fish native to Arizona and New Mexico, is now an endangered species.

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