CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
A busy week ended with a flourish, with Friday’s Federal Register alone containing 28 final regulations and 542 pages.
On to the data:
- Last week, 84 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 72 new final rules the previous week.
- That’s the equivalent of a new regulation precisely every two hours.
- So far in 2014, 2,677 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,579 new regulations this year. This would be the lowest total in decades; this will likely change as the year goes on.
- Last week, 1,762 new pages were added to the Federal Register.
- Currently at 58,221 pages, the 2014 Federal Register is on pace for 77,836 pages. This would be the 6th-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. Thirty-three such rules have been published so far this year, four 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.
- Two hundred and twenty-one final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
- So far in 2014, 513 new rules affect small businesses; 75 of them are classified as significant.
Highlights from selected final rules published last week:
- Three more migratory bird-hunting rules, each of which carry the standard “estimated consumer surplus across all flyways of $317.8-$416.8 million.”
- The TSA is getting rid of its aviation security infrastructure fee.
- The EPA is withdrawing water quality standards for Florida.
- The FCC is updating its regulations for antenna structures.
- Two new regulations for fireworks.
- Dodd-Frank implementation continues, with new rules for Regulation M, which covers consumer leasing, and Regulation Z, which covers truth in lending.
- Operator certification for cranes and derricks.
For more data, see Ten Thousand Commandments and follow @10KC and @RegoftheDay on Twitter.