CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

The Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill turned five years old this week (see CEI analysis here, here, and here). Other than that, it was business as usual, with 44 proposed regulations and more than 60 final regulations covering everything from bigeye tuna to heat pumps.

On to the data:

• Last week, 65 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 78 the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 35 minutes.
• So far in 2015, 1,801 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,171 new regulations this year, which would be several hundred fewer rules than the usual total of 3,500-plus.
• Last week, 1,540 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 2,764 pages the previous week.
• Currently at 44,209 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 77,833 pages.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. Sixteen 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 $1.32 billion to $1.41 billion for the current year.
• 150 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2015, 313 new rules affect small businesses; 46 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau decided to celebrate its fifth anniversary by delaying the implementation of one of that bill’s 398 regulations until October 3.
• A Defense Department rule concerning consumer credit for service members meets the qualifications for economic significance, with a first-year estimated cost of $106 million. But since the rule does not specifically declare it as economically significant, I can’t count it that way in our running tally.
• Minor correction to a recent fuel-efficiency regulations for larger cars and trucks.
• Catch limits for bigeye tuna, in case they don’t see you coming.
• Energy conservation standards for Packaged Terminal Air Conditioners and Packaged Terminal Heat Pumps

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