CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
The 1,000th new regulation of 2015 was published in Friday’s Federal Register, which itself hit the 25,000-page mark on the year. Even so, agencies are still well behind their usual rulemaking pace, on pace for slightly less than 3,000 regulations, compared to the usual pace of more than 3,500 rules.
On to the data:
- Last week, 65 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 79 new regulations the previous week.
- That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 35 minutes.
- So far in 2015, precisely 1,000 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 2,976 new regulations this year, which would be several hundred fewer rules than the usual total.
- Last week, 1,975 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,589 pages the previous week.
- Currently at 25,097 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 74,694 pages.
- Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. Seven such rules have been published so far this year, one in the past week.
- The total estimated compliance cost of 2015’s economically significant regulations ranges from $793 million to $846 million for the current year.
- 81 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
- So far in 2015, 183 new rules affect small businesses; 28 of them are classified as significant.
Highlights from selected final rules published last week:
- A new regulation concerning health care for military veterans meets the $100 million annual cost threshold for the “economically significant” classification, but the rule contains no cost estimate. Until the Veterans Affairs Department corrects this transparency failure, I am scoring this rule as costing the bare minimum of $100 million in our running compliance cost tally.
- Federal Labor Relations Authority employees might be bad at paying what they owe, because a new regulation is geared specifically at them, “governing procedures for collecting debts owed to the federal government by present and former FLRA employees.”
- In 2011, a drawbridge in Manitowoc, Wisconsin was dismantled. In 2015, the U.S. Coast Guard decided to stop deciding when that bridge goes up and down.
- A new bike path is going to be built in Bryce Canyon National Park.
- Some standards related to health insurance exchanges under the Affordable Care Act.
- New critical habitat for Neoso mucket and rabbitsfoot, to kinds of endangered mussels.
- Certain Energy Department officials may now arrest you without a warrant for certain crimes.
For more data, see Ten Thousand Commandments and follow @10KC and @RegoftheDay on Twitter.