CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week In Regulation
This week in the world of regulation:
- Last week, 86 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. This is up from 67 new final rules the previous week.
- That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every hour and fifty seven minutes — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
- All in all, 1,035 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
- If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,466 new final rules.
- Last week, 1,368 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 23,633 pages.
- At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 77,741 pages.
- Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. One such rule was published last week, for a total of 12 so far in 2013.
- The total estimated compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $5.58 billion to $10.19 billion.
- So far, 83 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
- So far this year, 188 final rules affect small business; 20 of them are significant rules.
Highlights from final rules published last week:
- This week’s economically significant rule sets new energy conservation standards for distribution transformers. The cost analysis is rather convoluted, but it will impose about $62.2 million in costs to manufacturers. Other costs are estimated to $2.89 billion using a 7 percent discount rate, or $5.22 billion using a 4 percent discount rate.
- The FCC issued another tinkering with its Broadband Plan for America.
- Yet another Navy regulation for preventing collisions at sea. Must be much more difficult than it would appear.
- The EPA issued a minor correction (fixing typos) to a rule allowing sorghum to be used to make ethanol.
- It also issued a minor correction for its mandatory greenhouse gas reporting rules.
- New federal rules for training and retraining miners.
- In a nod to postmodernism, the FDIC has revised its regulations for reviewing regulations.
For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.