CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

The big Snowzilla storm came and went, but still made its presence known in the Federal Register. For many documents, there is a lag of a few days between submission and publication. So while the first three days of the week it was business as usual despite a government slowdown, Thursday’s edition was only 69 pages, and Friday’s was 92 pages. A normal day is around 300 pages. Despite the temporary slowdown, regulators still issued rules covering everything from spray valves to alien medical exams.

On to the data:

• Last week, 56 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 59 the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation precisely every three hours.
• With 217 final regulations published so far in 2016, the federal government is on pace to issue 2,855 regulations in 2016. Last year’s total was 3,406 regulations.
• Last week, 1,096 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,213 pages the previous week.
• Currently at 5,029 pages, the 2016 Federal Register is on pace for 66,172 pages. To give some context, the 2015 Federal Register had an adjusted page count of 81,611.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. Three such rules have been published so far in 2016, one in the last week.
• The running compliance cost tally for 2016’s economically significant regulations ranges from $402 million to $1.24 billion.
• 27 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published this year.
• So far in 2016, 55 new rules affect small businesses; 13 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• A 67-page Energy Department regulation for pumps will cost somewhere between $80.2 million and $120 million per year.
• And another one for commercial prerinse spray valves, but we don’t know how much it costs because the Office of Management and Budget will not be doing a cost analysis.
• Medical examination of aliens.
• The U.S. government’s thaw with Cuba continues: new rules for asset control and licensing policies.
• 29,783 square nautical miles of ocean are being designated as critical habitat for North Atlantic right whales.
• The Small Business Administration is updating its definitions of “small business” for various and sundry industries.
• The FCC is exempting small Internet Service Providers from its net neutrality regulations.

For more data, see Ten Thousand Commandments and follow @10KC and @RegoftheDay on Twitter.