CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

It was a fairly typical week, with nearly 70 final regulations and more than 50 proposed regulations hitting the books, covering everything from potato handling to flying fuel cells. The big story to keep an eye out for is the preliminary version of the FCC’s net neutrality regulations, which should be appearing shortly. See here for CEI research on net neutrality.

On to the data:

• Last week, 68 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 58 new regulations the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 28 minutes.
• So far in 2015, 742 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 2,898 new regulations this year, which would be several hundred fewer rules than the usual total.
• Last week, 1,755 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,398 pages the previous week.
• Currently at 18,286 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 71,430 pages.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. Six 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 $693 million to $746 million for the current year.
• Sixty-six final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2015, 146 new rules affect small businesses; 25 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• Fun fact: the federal government has issued 142 regulations concerning Irish potatoes since 1994. The most recent one is here; the whole list is here.
• The FCC announced that the OMB approved its information collection rules for the next three years regarding an incentive auction for electromagnetic spectrum.
• A new regulation under the Children’s Gasoline Burn Prevention Act.
• A land plan for abandoned mines in Mississippi.
• A correction to health insurance exchange regulations from the Affordable Care act. Keep an eye out for another correction towards the end of June.
• Thinking of putting your spare fuel cell cartridges in your checked baggage next time you fly? Think again.
• The northern long-eared bat is now a threatened species.
• Fireworks naming regulations.
• The Education Department is revising its in-house rules for complying with the Freedom of Information Act.

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