CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

In a week like any other, federal agencies issued regulations for everything from dairy farmers’ profit margins to Canadian apple exports.

On to the data:

• Last week, 73 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 83 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 18 minutes.
• So far in 2014, 2,395 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,564 new regulations this year. This would be the lowest total in decades; this will likely change as the year goes on.
• Last week, 1,349 new pages were added to the Federal Register.
• Currently at 51,781 pages, the 2014 Federal Register is on pace for 77,056 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, none 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.
• 197 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2014, 460 new rules affect small businesses; 68 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• In a more delicious version of too-big-to-fail protections, the federal government guarantees dairy farmers a certain profit margin. It tweaked its methods for doing so in this new regulation.
• The Fish and Wildlife Service issued new sets of migratory bird regulations for the upcoming hunting season here and here.
• The Oregon spotted frog is now an endangered species.
• So is the Vandenberg monkeyflower.
• Meanwhile, the Short’s bladderpod and fleshy-fruit gladecress plant species received 2,488 acres of critical habitat.
• The Parole Commission is revising its rules for releasing prisoners and its post-release supervision policies.
• The Agricultural Marketing Service halved its assessment rate for date growers in Riverside County, California.
• New coverage regulations for preventive services under the Affordable Care Act.
• Some time ago, Congress passed the CALM Act, which regulates the volume of television commercials. The FCC passed a rule to implement the CALM Act on Wednesday.
• The federal government liberalized some of its policies for exporting apples to Canada.

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