CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

After several years and multiple lawsuits, the TSA deigned to issue a formal rule for its use of full-body scanners. CEI’s Marc Scribner finds that the “TSA has still failed to justify the procedures that it imposes on millions of Americans each day.” Other federal agencies issued new regulations covering everything from wine to lamb.

On to the data:

  • Last week, 80 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 6 minutes.
  • With 523 final regulations published so far in 2016, the federal government is on pace to issue 3,041 regulations in 2016. Last year’s total was 3,406 regulations.
  • Last week, 1,600 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,415 pages the previous week.
  • Currently at 11,636 pages, the 2016 Federal Register is on pace for 67,652 pages. 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. Five 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 $629 million to $1.46 billion.
  • 53 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published this year.
  • So far in 2016, 102 new rules affect small businesses; 19 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.