CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

It was a bit of a slow week as these things go, but regulators still published new rules on everything from stress testing to sage grouses. The Federal Register also has a chance of topping the 70,000-page mark next week.

On to the data:

• Last week, 59 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 74 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 51 minutes.
• So far in 2014, 3,196 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,551 new regulations this year.
• Last week, 1,404 new pages were added to the Federal Register.
• Currently at 68,388 pages, the 2014 Federal Register is on pace for 75,987 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, none 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.
• 258 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2014, 598 new rules affect small businesses; 88 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• Imidazoline requirements for child-resistant packaging.
• The Gunnison sage-grouse is now a threatened species.
• It also has been given 1.4 million acres of critical habitat.
• The FDIC is revising its annual stress testing requirements for certain banks.
• 10 new regulations from the FAA. See them here.

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