CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

A slow week closed with a bang, with Friday’s Federal Register containing 15 proposed regulations, 25 final regulations, and 502 pages. Throughout the week, new regulations cover everything from bird-hunting to sorghum.

On to the data:

  • Last week, 84 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 77 the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation precisely every two hours.
  • So far in 2015, 2,467 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,316 new regulations this year, far fewer than the usual total of 3,500-plus.
  • Last week, 1,301 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,876 pages the previous week.
  • Currently at 58,108 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 78,210 pages.
  • Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. 21 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 $1.69 billion to $1.81 billion for the current year.
  • 209 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
  • So far in 2015, 400 new rules affect small businesses; 56 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.