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.