CEI’s Battled Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

Nearly 2,000 Federal Register pages contain regulations for everything from pay ratios to apricots.

On to the data:

• Last week, 76 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 83 the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 13 minutes.
• So far in 2015, 2,105 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,248 new regulations this year, which would be several hundred fewer rules than the usual total of 3,500-plus.
• Last week, 1,993 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,285 pages the previous week.
• Currently at 49,073 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 74,969 pages.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. Nineteen such rules have been published so far this year, none in the past week.
• The total estimated compliance cost of 2015’s economically significant regulations ranges from $1.32 billion to $1.41 billion for the current year.
• 177 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2015, 352 new rules affect small businesses; 53 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• Esophageal thermal regulation devices are now class Type II medical devices.
• OSHA is streamlining its procedures for approving state governments’ occupational safety and health plans.
• The SEC’s controversial Dodd-Frank regulation requiring public companies to disclose the pay ratios between their highest-paid and median-paid employees was published. It is 85 pages long.
• Designated critical habitat for the Florida Brickell-bush (2,624 acres) and Carter’s small-flowered flax (2,649 acres).
• New regulations for apricots grown in Washington State; Irish potatoes grown in southeastern states; and onions grown in Idaho and Oregon.
• Regulations for water heaters.
• Reporting requirements for when your boat either comes or goes.
• Revised critical habitat for Hawaiian monk seals.
• Yet another spearmint oil regulation.

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