CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week In Regulation

This week in the world of regulation:

• Last week, 100 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 hour and 41 minutes — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
• All in all, 826 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
• If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,426 new final rules.
• Last week, 1,526 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 19,362 pages.
• At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 79,353 pages.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. For the third 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, 67 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
• So far this year, 151 final rules affect small business; 20 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

• The federal government sets the prevailing wages for immigrants working under H-2B visas for temporary non-agricultural employment. As CEI analysts have noted, the sheer complexity of America’s immigration system provides a powerful incentive to bypass the system and emigrate illegally.
• New particulate matter standards for Ohio, courtesy of the EPA.
• The Social Security Administration is changing its definition of “visual disorders.”
• The Navy is updating its policies for avoiding collisions at sea.
• Now that it’s 2013, the Homeland Security Department is updating its Form I-94 include an electronic format.

For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.