CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
The big news in regulation for the week came from Canada, which made official its one-in, one-out policy for new regulations. New regulations from agencies must be offset by repealing an existing regulation of similar cost. In the United States, new rules hit the books covering everything from crash test dummies to beekeepers.
On to the data:
- Last week, 77 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 57 new regulations the previous week.
- That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 11 minutes.
- So far in 2015, 927 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 2,934 new regulations this year, which would be several hundred fewer rules than the usual total.
- Last week, 1,589 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 2,127 pages the previous week.
- Currently at 23,122 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 73,171 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.
- Seventy-three final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
- So far in 2015, 159 new rules affect small businesses; 25 of them are classified as significant.
Highlights from selected final rules published last week:
- New protocols for importing apples from China, as well as Peruvian papayas.
- Loan guarantees for Ukraine.
- Minor correction to Medicare eligibility rules.
- A new crash test dummy “anthropomorphic test device” regulation requires that “The dummy's pelvis is impacted at the acetabulum at 6.7 ± 0.1 m/s.”
- Maturity requirements for avocados.
- Handling requirements for potatoes.
- The federal government has a National Honey Board. As part of the Honey Packers and Importers Research, Promotion, Consumer Education and Information Order, beekeepers will be paying a higher assessment rate into the program.
- The EPA issued a correction to its mandatory greenhouse gas reporting rules.
For more data, see Ten Thousand Commandments and follow @10KC and @RegoftheDay on Twitter.