CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
Wednesday’s Veterans’ Day holiday made it a short work week, but the Federal Register still passed the 70,000-page mark, with new regulations covering everything from Flugzeugbaus to recreational salmon.
On to the data:
- Last week, 44 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 77 the previous week.
- That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every three hours and 49 minutes.
- So far in 2015, 2,958 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,377 new regulations this year, fewer than the usual total of 3,500-plus.
- Last week, 1,556 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,850 pages the previous week.
- Currently at 70,933 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 80,974 pages.
- Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. 31 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 $3.63 billion to $4.88 billion for the current year.
- 257 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
- So far in 2015, 481 new rules affect small businesses; 70 of them are classified as significant.
Highlights from selected final rules published last week:
- Another regulation for Flugzeugbau gliders. That makes 103 Flugzeugbau regulations since 1994.
- A 311-page Medicare regulation meets the $100 million annual threshold for economic significance, though a precise cost estimate is not exactly forthcoming in the text. Since this is government spending and not compliance costs, I am scoring this rule as zero-cost in the running compliance cost tally.
- Traffic enforcement rules from NASA.
- Energy conservation standards for walk-in coolers and freezers.
- Federal regulations for recreational salmon fishing.
For more data, see Ten Thousand Commandments and follow @10KC and @RegoftheDay on Twitter.