CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

An otherwise slow week ended with a bang on Friday, with 27 new regulations, or nearly half the week’s total, covering everything from calorie counts to gas vapors.

On to the data:

• Last week, 60 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 72 new regulations the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 48 minutes.
• So far in 2015, 548 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 2,796 new regulations this year, which would be nearly 1,000 fewer rules than the usual total.
• Last week, 1,157 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,242 pages the previous week.
• Currently at 13,467 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 68,710 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.
• Fifty-five final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2015, 111 new rules affect small businesses; 19 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• Hillary Clinton’s email scandal has put transparency failures in the news. These failures are widespread. In one case that has generated almost no media attention, the Fish and Wildlife Service flat-out refused to perform cost-benefit analysis on one of its new rules because “The Service does not use cost-benefit considerations when making listing decisions under the Lacey Act.” That the agency is able to publish such a sentence without consequence says much about the state of federal transparency, and is a convincing case for reforming or repealing the Lacey Act. The government’s armed raid of the Gibson guitar company on Lacey Act grounds a few years ago is another argument.
• The Hawaiian monk seal’s new doubly scientific name is (Neomonachus schauinslandi (=Monachus schauinslandi)).
• Updates to pipeline safety rules.
• Many chain restaurants are required to post calorie information on their menus. As a possible early warning of mission creep, the FDA is issuing a nutrition labeling guide for mom-and-pop restaurants.
• New gasoline vapor recovery requirements in Illinois.
• The Department of Health and Human Services issued a new regulation to describe its logo.
• A correction to the EPA’s mandatory greenhouse gas reporting regulations.

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