CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
It was business as usual, with new rules hitting the books on everything from political speech restrictions to butterflies to football broadcasts.
On to the data:
- Last week, 74 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 52 new final rules the previous week.
- That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 16 minutes.
- So far in 2014, 2,944 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,573 new regulations this year.
- Last week, 1,251 new pages were added to the Federal Register.
- Currently at 63,779 pages, the 2014 Federal Register is on pace for 77,402 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. 34 such rules have been published so far this year, none 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.
- 242 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
- So far in 2014, 552 new rules affect small businesses; 80 of them are classified as significant.
Highlights from selected final rules published last week:
- Revised onion grading standards, but not for Bermuda-Granex-Grano (BGG) and Creole Type onions.
- The FCC removed its local blackout requirements for television broadcasts of lightly-attended sports games. The NFL, however, is still free to black games out; the FCC will simply no longer back it up.
- Express Mail® shall henceforth be known as Priority Mail Express®
- The Federal Election Commission is revising its restrictions on political speech.
- The EPA issued a correction on its mandatory greenhouse gas reporting requirements.
- 18 new EPA regulations, all in all. See them all here.
- The Dakota skipper, a kind of butterfly, is now a threatened species. The Poweshiek skipperling, another butterfly, is now an endangered species.
For more data, see Ten Thousand Commandments and follow @10KC and @RegoftheDay on Twitter.