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:

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