CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week In Regulation

This week in the world of regulation:

• Last week, 88 new final rules were published, up from 32 the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 1 hour and 54 minutes — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• All in all, 3,392 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
• If this keeps up, the total tally for 2012 will be 3,706 new rules.
• Last week, 1,849 new pages were added to the 2012 Federal Register, for a total of 71,120 pages.
• At its current pace, the 2012 Federal Register will run 76,970 pages.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. The 45 such rules published so far in 2012 have compliance costs of at least $24 billion. Two of the rules do not have cost estimates, and two other rules have cost estimates that do not give a total annual cost. We assume that rules lacking this basic transparency measure cost the bare minimum of $100 million per year. The true cost is almost certainly higher.
• No economically significant rules were published last week.
• So far, 321 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2012.
• So far this year, 632 final rules affect small business; 90 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

• The FCC passed two new rules to regulate how your phone bill is formatted.
• The FDA has helpfully announced that the compliance date for all food labeling regulations it issues in 2013-14 will be January 1, 2016. Should do a little bit to ease regulatory uncertainty.
• In August 2011, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued new side impact safety standards. A new rule issued on Wednesday corrects a mistake in the original rule.
• The EPA had a busy week, passing 15 new regulations.

For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.