CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

It was a short work week due to the Labor Day holiday, but agencies still found the time to finalize new regulations covering everything from unfinished wood to fleeing felons.

On to the data:

  • Last week, 48 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 80 the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every three hours and 30 minutes.
  • So far in 2015, 2,306 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,276 new regulations this year, which would be more than 200 fewer rules than the usual total of 3,500-plus.
  • Last week, 1,322 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,313 pages the previous week.
  • Currently at 55,011 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 78,141 pages.
  • Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. Nineteen 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.
  • 194 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
  • So far in 2015, 383 new rules affect small businesses; 55 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

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