CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

This week was about as normal as it ever gets on the regulatory front, with the number of new regulations and Federal Register pages well within their normal range.

On to the data:

• Last week, 78 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 92 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and nine minutes.
• All in all, 3,120 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
• If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,594 new final rules.
• Last week, 1,419 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 66,624 pages.
• At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 76,756 pages, which would be good for fifth 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, keeping the total at 35 so far in 2013.
• The total estimated compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $6.42 billion to $11.82 billion.
• So far, 280 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
• So far this year, 613 final rules affect small business; 83 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• Federal employees who are D.C. residents are having some restrictions on their allowed political activities loosened, such as the ability to run for office as a political partisan.
• The federal government regulates the caps that appear on the end of toy guns.
• The federal government’s revised intrastate and interstate turtle requirements, which have previously appeared in this space, have been given an effective date of December 9, 2013.
• OSHA is issuing new standards for signs.
• New tire grading standards from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
• In a bit of good news, the Steller seal lion has been delisted from the List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife.

For more data, see Ten Thousand Commandments and follow @10KC and @RegoftheDay on Twitter.