CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

It was a short week due to the Labor Day holiday, but agencies still managed to issue more than 60 new regulations and push the Federal Register over the 53,000-page mark.

On to the data:

• Last week, 62 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 73 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 43 minutes.
• So far in 2014, 2,457 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,571 new regulations this year. This would be the lowest total in decades; this will likely change as the year goes on.
• Last week, 1,238 new pages were added to the Federal Register.
• Currently at 53,019 pages, the 2014 Federal Register is on pace for 77,063 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. 29 such rules have been published so far this year, one 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.
• 200 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2014, 474 new rules affect small businesses; 69 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• This week’s economically significant rules are for the upcoming bird-hunting season. Neither says much about compliance costs, so I’m scoring both as zero-cost on our running compliance cost tally. The rule does estimate an “estimated consumer surplus across all flyways of $317.8-$416.8 million.”
• HHS tinkered with the eligibility requirements for participating its health insurance exchanges.
• Foodies might be interested to know that it is now legal to import litchi and longan fruits from Vietnam.
• Updated energy labeling requirements for certain heating and cooling products.
• Another rule for preventing collisions at sea.
• Endangered species status for the Florida brickell-bush and Carter’s small-flowered flax.
• And also a mix of endangered and threatened statuses for five types of sturgeon, four types of hammerhead shark, and an experimental population of Upper Columbia River spring-run Chinook salmon.

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