CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

Despite a respite for Thanksgiving, the 2015 Federal Register is now on pace to set an all-time record page count. It began publication in 1936. New regulations from the short week cover everything from California raisins to recombinant DNA technology.

On to the data:

  • Last week, 60 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 67 the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 48 minutes.
  • So far in 2015, 3,085 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,383 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 74,670 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 81,875 pages. This would break 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.
  • 272 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
  • So far in 2015, 508 new rules affect small businesses; 76 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.