CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

The Federal Register passed the 35,000-page mark with new regulations covering everything from food additives to chimpanzees.

On to the data:

• Last week, 81 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 64 the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 4 minutes.
• So far in 2015, 1,446 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of exactly 3,064 new regulations this year, which would be several hundred fewer rules than the usual total of 3,500-plus.
• Last week, 1,542 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,752 pages the previous week.
• Currently at 35,437 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 75,078 pages.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. Eleven 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 $1.39 billion to $1.46 billion for the current year.
• 119 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2015, 255 new rules affect small businesses; 35 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• The Department of Health and Human Services is doing a bit of housekeeping by removing what it terms “obsolete regulations.” More agencies should do this on a regular basis.
• The Equal Opportunity Employment Commission added an address change to §1611.3, paragraph (b)(3) of 29 CFR 900-1899.
• The Treasury Department will now set the interest rate on secure immigration bonds.
• The FDA gave the green light to a food additive called TBHQ.
• All chimpanzees, whether wild or captive, are to be treated as an endangered species.
• As part of the loosening of the Cuba embargo, the Foreign Assets Control Office is amending its in-house list of state sponsors of terrorism.
• Seven substances will continue to be allowed in organic food, as the Agricultural Marketing Service defines the term.

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