CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

It was a comparatively slow week for regulations, though agencies still published new rules ranging from bright lamps to train doors.

On to the data:

  • Last week, 55 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 61 the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and three minutes.
  • So far in 2015, 3,201 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,362 new regulations this year, fewer than the usual total of 3,500-plus.
  • Last week, 1,307 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,247 pages the previous week.
  • Currently at 77,224 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 81,118 pages. This would be just shy of 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. 34 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 $3.68 billion to $4.93 billion for the current year.
  • 288 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
  • So far in 2015, 520 new rules affect small businesses; 82 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.