CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the King v. Burwell case last week. The decision, likely to appear in June, will determine in part whether regulatory agencies are allowed to rewrite legislation passed by Congress. Other than that, it was business as usual, with new regulations covering everything from 15 EPA rules to school lunches.

On to the data:

• Last week, 72 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 65 new regulations the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 20 minutes.
• So far in 2015, 488 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 2,542 new regulations this year, which would be roughly 1,000 fewer rules than the usual total.
• Last week, 1,242 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,715 pages the previous week.
• Currently at 12,310 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 69,944 pages.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. Five such rules have been published so far this year, none in the past week.
• The total estimated compliance cost of 2015’s economically significant regulations ranges from $647 million to $700 million for the current year.
• Forty-eight final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2015, 108 new rules affect small businesses; 17 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• Corrections to recent energy efficiency rules for walk-in freezers and “certain industrial equipment.”
• The Federal Election Commission is updating its restrictions on political speech.
• 15 new EPA regulations. See them all here.
• The Cheesequake Creek runs through Morgan, New Jersey. The federal government regulates when a drawbridge crossing the creek goes up and down. A new regulation alters that schedule to allow for repairs.
• A similar federal regulation affects a drawbridge running over the Cape Fear River in Wilmington, North Carolina.
• A one-paragraph FDA regulation removes another paragraph from its list of banned devices.
• Whistleblower rules from Sarbanes-Oxley, updated under Dodd-Frank. 
• Rural Call Completion Recordkeeping and Reporting Requirements.
• One way the FCC prevents open competition is by regulating foreign Internet Service Providers. By raising their costs, this artificially advantages domestic ISPs. A new regulation updates foreign providers’ information collection requirements.
• The federal government now regulates hiring requirements for lunch workers at local governments’ public schools.

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