CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

Even with a mid-term election coming up next month, agencies are cranking out a dozen or so new regulations every workday. The federal government also announced that, having solved all other problems, it will be holding a Tall Wood Building Prize Competition.

On to the data:

• Last week, 62 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 79 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 43 minutes.
• So far in 2014, 2,818 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,576 new regulations this year. This would be the lowest total in decades; this will likely change as the year goes on.
• Last week, 1,503 new pages were added to the Federal Register.
• Currently at 61,538 pages, the 2014 Federal Register is on pace for 78,094 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. 34 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.
• 231 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2014, 538 new rules affect small businesses; 79 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• Fresh Philippine bananas may now be exported to Guam, Hawaii, and the Northern Mariana Islands.
• The federal government is establishing a new wine-growing region in California, “Eagle Peak Mendocino County.”
• Busy week at the EPA, with 20 new regulations, nearly a third of last week’s total federal output.
• The straight-horned markhor, an ungulate native to Afghanistan and Pakistan, is now a threatened species. This is an upgrade from its previous endangered status, so this one is good news.
• As of January 1, 2015, the minimum wage for federal contractors will rise to $10.10.

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