CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

Regulators took advantage of the full-length work week by publishing nearly 100 regulations, running the gamut from mad cow disease to falconry federalism.

On to the data:

• Last week, 95 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 77 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every one hour and 46 minutes.
• All in all, 3,418 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
• If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,636 new final rules.
• Last week, 1,699 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 73,093 pages. This year’s Federal Register is already the 11th largest in its 78-year history.
• At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 77,759 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 37 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, 305 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
• So far this year, 672 final rules affect small business; 91 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• This week’s economically significant rule will lower the government’s Medicare payments by an estimated $200 million. Since this affects government spending and not compliance costs, I am scoring this rule as zero-cost in our running compliance cost tally.
• New safety standards for hand-held infant carriers. Somewhere, a trial lawyer is salivating.
• Two new regulations for fishers of Pacific cod.
• The IRS is changing its tax treatment of certain types of dividends for certain types of people.
• You may now ride a bicycle at the redundantly named New River Gorge National River, provided you stick to the trails.
• In a nice little bit of corporate welfare for the green products industry, the Rural Utilities Service offers financial assistance to people meeting certain qualifications if they purchase approved energy-efficient products.
• Falconry federalism.
• The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is harmonizing its mad cow disease regulations with the World Organization for Animal Health’s Terrestrial Animal Health Code.
• The FAA issued a regulation for NASA astronauts.

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