CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

This week in the world of regulation:

• Last week, 78 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, despite the July 4th holiday. There were 80 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and nine minutes — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
• All in all, 1,846 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
• If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,623 new final rules.
• Last week, 1,461 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 40,565 pages.
• At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 78,615 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 16 so far in 2013.
• The total estimated compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $5.78 billion to $10.39 billion.
• So far, 130 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
• So far this year, 312 final rules affect small business; 28 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

• This week’s economically significant rule prohibits students from receiving two consecutive Pell grants in the same year. The final rule does not contain a cost estimate, which is bad transparency. Fortunately, the earlier interim final rule does estimate that this will reduce anticipated federal spending by “approximately $24.3 billion over five years.” Since this affects government spending and not compliance costs, I am not counting this in the running compliance cost tally.
• A new regulation allows Customs to refuse to allow products into the country if they are not satisfied with their energy efficiency – or their labeling.
• The EPA has issued a new standard for measuring airborne lead.
• The EPA also issued new air quality regulations for Virginia, Illinois, and the District of Columbia.
• Federal organ transplant regulations now include blood vessels in the definition of “organ.” If they are attached to another organ covered under this definition.
• The federal government has a California Desert Grape Administrative Committee. It is raising the assessment rate it charges growers inside its jurisdiction.
• The National Mango Board is revising its membership rules to include more foreign producers.
• New FCC regulation for closed captioning of programming delivered over the Internet.
• New critical habitat designated for the fountain darter, a small fish “generally smaller than 3 cm long” found in Texas.
• The Buena Vista Lake shrew is also receiving 2,485 acres of critical habitat.

For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.