CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

The Federal Register burst past the 50,000-page mark with Friday’s 878-page effort, which also contained 21 final regulations and four “significant” documents.

On to the data:

• Last week, 83 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 75 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and one minute.
• So far in 2014, 2,322 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,561 new regulations this year. This would be the lowest total in decades; this will likely change as the year goes on.
• Last week, 1,882 new pages were added to the Federal Register.
• Currently at 50,432 pages, the 2014 Federal Register is on pace for 77,350 pages. This would be the 6^th-largest page count since the Federal Register began publication in 1936.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. 27 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 $7.62 billion to $10.87 billion. They also affect several billion dollars of government spending.
• 189 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2014, 440 new rules affect small businesses; 64 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• New regulations for importing live dogs.
• Speaking of dogs, a new federal regulation makes it illegal for a commercial dogwalker to walk more than four dogs at once without a permit, but only in certain areas of San Francisco.
• The Coast Guard published a rule establishing a 1,000-yard temporary security zone around President Obama and his family while they vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
• This week’s economically significant rule comes from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is increasing its payments to hospice providers by $230 million. Since the rule is mum on compliance costs, I am scoring it as zero-cost on our running compliance cost tally.
• The Food Safety and Inspection Service has revamped its poultry slaughter inspection regulations.
• HUD has revised its internal environmental compliance recordkeeping requirements.
• The SEC issued some corrections to earlier swap dealer regulations.
• On September 6 at 8:30 PM, there will be a wedding-related fireworks show on the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey. The Coast Guard, and not the local government, will establish a safety zone near the show.

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