CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
The 2016 Federal Register surpassed 40,000 pages last week, with new rules ranging from lights on farm equipment to grading raisins.
On to the data:
- Last week, 77 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 93 the previous week.
- That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 11 minutes.
- With 1,672 final regulations published so far in 2016, the federal government is on pace to issue 3,426 regulations in 2016. Last year’s total was 3,406 regulations.
- Last week, 1,343 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,802 pages the previous week.
- Currently at 41,149 pages, the 2016 Federal Register is on pace for 84,322 pages. This would exceed the 2015 Federal Register’s all-time record adjusted page count of 81,611.
- Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. 16 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 $3.70 billion to $5.62 billion.
- 132 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published this year.
- So far in 2016, 331 new rules affect small businesses; 49 of them are classified as significant.
Highlights from selected final rules published last week:
- Federal standards for lights on farm equipment.
- You can buy crop insurance from the federal government. Here are the latest revisions to the program.
- The Industry and Security Bureau has updated its penalties for people who violate its exporting regulations.
- The elfin woods warbler is now a threatened species.
- Limits on the number of takeoffs and landings at JFK Airport.
- NASA is eliminating redundant regulations, and some obsolete ones. More agencies should follow NASA’s lead.
- A new Medicare rule for lab test payments meets the $100 million economically significant threshold, but regulators declined to give a cost analysis. “[B]ecause such data are not yet available, we are limited in our ability to provide estimated impacts of the payment policies under different scenarios.” Will they provide a retrospective cost analysis when they do have data?
- How to grade raisins.
- Incinerating solid waste.
For more data, see Ten Thousand Commandments and follow @10KC and @RegoftheDay on Twitter.