CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

This week in the world of regulation:

  • Last week, 61 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 58 new final rules the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 45 minutes — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
  • All in all, 2,594 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
  • If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,698 new final rules.
  • Last week, 1,849 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 56,617 pages.
  • At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 79,518 pages, which would be good for third all time. The current record is 81,405 pages, set in 2010.
  • Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. No such rules were published last week, for a total of 26 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, 224 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
  • So far this year, 497 final rules affect small business; 66 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

  • The FDIC issued a 7-page rule defining the term “Insured deposit.”
  • The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is lifting its ban on Sharwil avocados from Hawaii.
  • The southern white rhino is now listed as a threatened species. This is not because of its own population levels, but because the southern white rhino looks like other endangered rhino species.
  • The Texas golden gladecress, and the Neches River rose-mallow, two types of plants in Texas, are now respectively listed as endangered and threatened. They are also receiving designated critical habitat areas totaling a little more than 1,500 acres.
  • The federal government sells insurance for processing sweet corn. On Tuesday, it made a few changes to the program.

For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.