CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week In Regulation

This week in the world of regulation:

  • Last week, 59 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. This is down from 60 new final rules the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 51 minutes — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
  • All in all, 726 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
  • If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,271 new final rules.
  • Last week, 1,262 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 17,836 pages.
  • At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 79,625 pages.
  • Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. For the second week in a row, no such rules were published, keeping the total at 10 so far in 2013.
  • The total estimated compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $2.632 billion to $4.910 billion.
  • So far, 65 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
  • So far this year, 136 final rules affect small business; 19 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

  • Busy week at the FAA, with 20 new rules hitting the books — more than a third of this week’s 59 total rules.
  • Arizona may be landlocked, but that didn’t stop the Coast Guard from establishing a safety area in Lake Havasu for a local triathlon.
  • The Patent and Trademark Office issued a correction to its recent adjustment of patent fees.
  • If you export pork, you are required to file a weekly report to the USDA.

For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.