CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
This week in the world of regulation:
- Last week, 72 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. This is up from 61 new final rules the previous week.
- That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 20 minutes — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
- All in all, 1,499 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
- If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,463 new final rules.
- Last week, 1,563 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 34,491 pages.
- At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 78,389 pages.
- Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. No such rules were published for the second consecutive week, for a total of 13 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, 108 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
- So far this year, 265 final rules affect small business; 23 of them are significant rules.
Highlights from final rules published last week:
- Non-economists have been pushing Buy-American provisions for years. It turns out there are also non-economists in the Indian Affairs Department, since a new rule requires the government to set aside a certain amount of procurement contracts for Indian-owned businesses.
- There is a drawbridge in Tacoma, Washington that spans the City Waterway. The federal government sets its schedule.
- The federal government sells pecan insurance. A new rule corrects errors made in a previous rule from February.
- The EPA is revising motor vehicle emissions budgets for Cincinnati suburbs in Kentucky.
- More regulations for avoiding collisions at sea.
- The FCC issued new guidelines for safe levels of exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields.
For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.