CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

In a week like any other, regulatory agencies issued more than 50 new rules covering everything from from rockfish to wine.

On to the data:

• Last week, 57 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 59 new regulations the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 57 minutes.
• So far in 2015, 311 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 2,592 new regulations this year, which would be roughly 1,000 fewer rules than the usual total.
• Last week, 1,341 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,445 pages the previous week.
• Currently at 6,885 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 68,850 pages, which would be the lowest page count since 1992.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. Three such rules have been published so far this year, one in the past week.
• The total estimated compliance cost of 2015’s economically significant regulations is $630 million for the current year.
• Twenty-seven final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2015, 67 new rules affect small businesses; seven of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• The Education Department is preparing to give $506 million in grants to local schools. Though this rule qualifies as economically significant, I am scoring it as zero-cost in our running compliance cost tally because that money is government spending, rather than compliance costs.
• Certain populations in Georgia of yelloweye rockfish, canary rockfish, and bocaccio (not be confused with Boccaccio, author of the Decameron) are receiving designated critical habitat.
• Some technical changes to the Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D programs.
• The federal government has both an Aging Administration and a Community Living Administration. A new regulation gives guidance to their ombudsmen.
• An amendment to the U.S-Australia preferential trade agreement.
• Lolita is a captive orca at the Miami Seaquarium. A new regulation officially includes her in the Southern Resident killer whale population, from which she was taken in 1970. Legal wrangling is sure to follow.
• The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau has established the Rocks District of Milton-Freewater viticultural area.

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