CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

The Federal Register took Tuesday off to observe Veterans’ Day. The short week was still a busy one, with Thursday’s edition alone totaling 783 pages.

On to the data:

• Last week, 74 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 59 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 16 minutes.
• So far in 2014, 3,137 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,565 new regulations this year.
• Last week, 1,755 new pages were added to the Federal Register.
• Currently at 66,984 pages, the 2014 Federal Register is on pace for 76,119 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. 39 such rules have been published so far this year, two in the past week.
• The total estimated compliance costs of 2014’s economically significant regulations currently ranges from $7.60 billion to $10.85 billion. They also affect several billion dollars of government spending.
• 255 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2014, 559 new rules affect small businesses; 88 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• An economically significant rule from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will increase spending by $5.1 billion next year. Since this is government spending and not compliance costs, I am scoring this rule as zero-cost on our running compliance cost tally.
• I challenge you to make sense of this 464-page rule, also from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It contains nearly a full page of just acronyms, and the linguistic opacity is truly something to behold. This approach to regulation contributes to the health care system’s dysfunctionality.
• If a pilot is between 60 and 65 years old, his co-pilot must be under 60.
• 20 species of coral are being added to the endangered species list.
• Critical habitat for rockfish.
• Clarification of grading standards for avocados.
• The federal government has a Mango Promotion, Research and Information Order. The Agricultural Marketing Service issued a rule to review it, and concluded there is a continued need for it.
• Thinking of trafficking arms to Vietnam? Make sure you read this new regulation first.
• Another regulation for preventing collisions at sea, the 483rd since 1994. See them all here.

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