CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

The number of new regulations on the year passed the 3,000 mark last week, and the Federal Register is nearly on pace to set an all-time record page count. New rules cover everything from identifying jelly to avoiding seabirds, as well as more than 200 pages of crowdfunding regulations.

On to the data:

  • Last week, 67 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 44 the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 30 minutes.
  • So far in 2015, 3,025 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,376 new regulations this year, fewer than the usual total of 3,500-plus.
  • Last week, 2,227 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,556 pages the previous week.
  • Currently at 72,897 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 81,359 pages. This threatens the all-time record set in 2010, with 81,405 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.
  • 263 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
  • So far in 2015, 494 new rules affect small businesses; 72 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.