CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

The 2016 Federal Register broke the 50,000-page mark on Friday, and remains on a record pace. New regulations for the week ranged from cement to school lunches.

On to the data:

• Last week, 70 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 77 the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 24 minutes.
• With 2,076 final regulations published so far in 2016, the federal government is on pace to issue 3,555 regulations in 2016. Last year’s total was 3,406 regulations.
• Last week, 1,965 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,745 pages the previous week.
• Currently at 50,213 pages, the 2016 Federal Register is on pace for 85,982 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. 21 such rules have been published so far in 2016, two in the last week.
• The running compliance cost tally for 2016’s economically significant regulations ranges from $3.92 billion to $6.12 billion.
• 163 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published this year.
• So far in 2016, 380 new rules affect small businesses; 61 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• An economically significant regulation for school lunches claims billions in benefits from reduced obesity, but fails to quantify the costs. So I am scoring it as zero-cost in our running compliance cost tally. If the Food and Nutrition Service fixes its transparency shortcoming, I’ll update the tally accordingly.
• The FAA issued new size requirements for repair stations.
• Ethics standards for executive branch employees.
• OSHA published new rules for crystalline silica exposure.
• Swordfish quotas.
• Emission standards for manufacturers of Portland cement.
• Energy conservation tests for ceiling fans.
• The Industry and Security Bureau is moving its controls for certain chemical and biological weapons, as well as “directed energy weapons” from the Unites States Munition List to the Commerce Control List.
• The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is discontinuing some of its rulemaking activities.
• Grain standards.

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