CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
New regulations last week covered everything from growing cherries to airport security fees to preventing collisions at sea.
On to the data:
- Last week, 65 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 70 the previous week.
- That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 35 minutes.
- So far in 2015, 1,301 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of exactly 3,012 new regulations this year, which would be several hundred fewer rules than the usual total of 3,500-plus.
- Last week, 1,344 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 980 pages the previous week.
- Currently at 32,143 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 74,406 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.
- 109 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
- So far in 2015, 220 new rules affect small businesses; 33 of them are classified as significant.
Highlights from selected final rules published last week:
- The federal government has a Cherry Industry Administrative Board. Relatedly, if you grow tart cherries in Michigan, you owe the federal government money.
- New FDA classification for the rectal control system.
- Every time you go through the TSA’s security checkpoints, you get charged for it, despite their recently uncovered 95 percent failure rate in finding dangerous items. A new regulation places a cap on that fee for roundtrip fliers.
- New energy conservation rules for fluorescent lamp ballasts.
- Preventing collisions at sea.
- Rules for practicing law before the Postal Service.
For more data, see Ten Thousand Commandments and follow @10KC and @RegoftheDay on Twitter.