CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

A normal week ended with a bang, with more than 450 pages of EPA regulations swelling Friday’s Federal Register to more than 800 pages (normal is around 300). New rules cover everything from power plants to cotton.

On to the data:

  • Last week, 80 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 63 the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 6 minutes.
  • So far in 2015, 2,754 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,359 new regulations this year, far fewer than the usual total of 3,500-plus.
  • Last week, 2,048 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,796 pages the previous week.
  • Currently at 65,119 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 79,414 pages.
  • Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. 23 such rules have been published so far this year, one in the past week.
  • The total estimated compliance cost of 2015’s economically significant regulations ranges from $3.13 billion to $4.38 billion for the current year.
  • 230 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
  • So far in 2015, 445 new rules affect small businesses; 62 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.