CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

Another Friday meant another 699-page Federal Register, which now exceeds 20,000 pages on the year. The big news is a fiduciary rule for retirement planning, but 86 other new regulations for the week cover everything from garage door openers to fresh peppers.

On to the data:

• Last week, 87 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 92 the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every one hour and 56 minutes.
• With 887 final regulations published so far in 2016, the federal government is on pace to issue 3,261 regulations in 2016. Last year’s total was 3,406 regulations.
• Last week, 2,201 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,958 pages the previous week.
• Currently at 21,188 pages, the 2016 Federal Register is on pace for 77,898 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. Seven 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.
• 77 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published this year.
• So far in 2016, 164 new rules affect small businesses; 27 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• Record collections for boats.
• The week’s most important regulation is a 58-page fiduciary rule for retirement planning.
• The definition of a spouse. In this case a good thing, because it affirms the recent Supreme Court decision on marriage equality.
• Blackberries and raspberries from Ecuador.
• And fresh peppers.
• A correction to an earlier washing machine regulation.
• The U.S. has the developed world’s highest corporate tax rates. If you’re thinking of moving your company’s headquarters outside of the U.S. and paying tax to another government instead, the IRS would rather you keep your company’s headquarters in the U.S.
• Garage door openers.
• The big sandy crayfish is now a threatened species, and the Guyandotte River crayfish is now an endangered species.
• But captive-bred tiger regulations are now a little looser.
• Sanitary transportation of human and animal food.

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