CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

It was a short work week due to the Fourth of July holiday, but agencies still managed to issue new rules covering everything from stormwater to seatbelts.

On to the data:

  • Last week, 50 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 137 the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every one hour and 14 minutes.
  • With 1,859 final regulations published so far in 2016, the federal government is on pace to issue 3,548 regulations in 2016. Last year’s total was 3,406 regulations.
  • Last week, 1,293 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 2,051 pages the previous week.
  • Currently at 44,693 pages, the 2016 Federal Register is on pace for 85,292 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. 19 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 $3.82 billion to $6.02 billion.
  • 141 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published this year.
  • So far in 2016, 354 new rules affect small businesses; 53 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.