CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

Like most of the country, the federal government shut down for Thanksgiving. Despite the short work week, agencies still produced a roughly average number of regulations, while the Federal Register emphatically broke the 70,000-page barrier. There were an impressive 18 new regulations that affect small businesses; perhaps small business owners should be thankful it wasn’t an even worse week.

On to the data:

  • Last week, 77 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 60 new final rules the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 11 minutes.
  • All in all, 3,323 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
  • If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,612 new final rules.
  • Last week, 1,794 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 71,394 pages.
  • At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 77,516 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. One such rule was published last week, for a total of 36 so far in 2013.
  • The total estimated compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $6.42 billion to $11.83 billion.
  • So far, 297 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
  • So far this year, 650 final rules affect small business; 88 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

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