CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

Friday’s Federal Register, the last before the Easter holiday, contained 1,005 pages, 14 final regulations, nine proposed regulations, and an impressive 119 agency notices. New rules for the week cover everything from tomatoes to dockworkers.

On to the data:

  • Last week, 53 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 66 the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every three hours and 10 minutes.
  • With 708 final regulations published so far in 2016, the federal government is on pace to issue 3,052 regulations in 2016. Last year’s total was 3,406 regulations.
  • Last week, 2,109 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,683 pages the previous week.
  • Currently at 17,029 pages, the 2016 Federal Register is on pace for 73,401 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. Six such rules have been published so far in 2016, none in the last week.
  • The running compliance cost tally for 2016’s economically significant regulations ranges from $629 million to $1.46 billion.
  • 65 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published this year.
  • So far in 2016, 133 new rules affect small businesses; 22 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.