CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
It was a four-day work week because of the Memorial Day holiday, but regulators still had a busy week, with new regulations covering everything from potato-handling to area code overlays. The Federal Register also topped the 30,000-page mark.
On to the data:
- Last week, 70 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 49 the previous week.
- That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 24 minutes.
- So far in 2015, 1,236 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of exactly 3,000 new regulations this year, which would be several hundred fewer rules than the usual total of 3,500-plus.
- Last week, 980 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,780 pages the previous week.
- Currently at 30,799 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 74,755 pages.
- Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. Nine 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 $1.36 billion to $1.44 billion for the current year.
- 104 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
- So far in 2015, 216 new rules affect small businesses; 32 of them are classified as significant.
Highlights from selected final rules published last week:
- You are now allowed to export arms to Fiji if you like.
- There was also a slight loosening of arms importation rules.
- NASA, in a bit of housecleaning all agencies should emulate once in a while, is repealing some of its obsolete regulations.
- The FDA is reclassifying a naughty-sounding device.
- Another potato-handling regulation.
- And another spearmint oil regulation.
- The Transportation Department is raising its maximum denied boarding compensation, as well as liability limits for luggage.
- The states, not the federal government, will be the final arbiter of area code policy.
For more data, see Ten Thousand Commandments and follow @10KC and @RegoftheDay on Twitter.