CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
The big story of the week was the new proposed payday lending regulation, which ate up 356 pages of Friday’s 625-page Federal Register. It is open for public comment until October 7; submit yours here. The number of new final regulations for the year also passed the 2,000 mark. Other regulations for the week ranged from towboats to swimming pools.
On to the data:
- Last week, 77 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 70 the previous week.
- That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 11 minutes.
- With 2,006 final regulations published so far in 2016, the federal government is on pace to issue 3,557 regulations in 2016. Last year’s total was 3,406 regulations.
- Last week, 1,745 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,810 pages the previous week.
- Currently at 48,248 pages, the 2016 Federal Register is on pace for 85,547 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.
- 150 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published this year.
- So far in 2016, 370 new rules affect small businesses; 57 of them are classified as significant.
Highlights from selected final rules published last week:
- Energy conservation tests for “miscellaneous refrigeration products.”
- Olives grown in California.
- “Requirements for the Disposition of Non-Ambulatory Disabled Veal Calves.”
- How to inspect towboats.
- Anti-terrorism standards for chemical facilities.
- The federal government has a Softwood Lumber Research, Promotion, Consumer Education and Industry Information program. A referendum among members of the industry on whether to get rid of the program, scheduled for this August, “has been postponed until a future date to be determined by the Secretary.” Nothing sketchy about that at all.
- Good news: the lesser prairie-chicken is no longer a threatened species.
- Regulations for the types of drains allowed in swimming pools.
- A new “Top of the Mitt” wine-growing region in Michigan.
- Two new regulations for preventing collisions at sea, here and here.
For more data, see Ten Thousand Commandments and follow @10KC and @RegoftheDay on Twitter.