CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

It was a slower week than usual, with 34 proposed regulations and fewer than 40 final regulations covering everything from missile exports to hydropower. Even so, the 2015 Federal Register will likely top the 20,000-page mark on Tuesday or Wednesday of this week.

On to the data:

• Last week, 39 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 68 new regulations the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every four hours and 19 minutes.
• So far in 2015, 779 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 2,822 new regulations this year, which would be several hundred fewer rules than the usual total.
• Last week, 1,120 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,755 pages the previous week.
• Currently at 19,406 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 70,312 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.
• 68 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2015, 151 new rules affect small businesses; 25 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• A new EPA ozone-related regulation for refrigerators and air conditioners.
• Vacaturs for gasification, also courtesy of the EPA.
• The EPA is removing a site in Utah from its list of Superfund sites, although “this deletion does not preclude future actions under Superfund.”
• With 10 new final regulations, the EPA accounted for more than a quarter of the week’s rulemaking. See them all here, along with the 11,785 final regulations the EPA has issued since 1994.
• If your business exports missiles, take note of revised security regulations.
• Revised fees for hydropower generated on government-owned land.
• A new regulation changes the name of the federal government’s Anti-Infective Drugs Committee to the Antimicrobial Drugs Advisory Committee.

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