Regulation Roundup

The latest goings-on in the world of regulation:

  • The 2012 Federal Register is already over 1,000 pages long. After five working days, it’s already up to 1,384 pages.
  • The 2011 Federal Register weighs in at 82,419 pages. That’s 328 pages per work day. Adjusting the count for skips, jumps, and blank pages would probably yield around 81,000 pages. That adjusted count should come out soon. The all-time record adjusted page count is 81,405 pages, set in 2010.
  • My colleague Wayne Crews has set up TenThousandCommandments.com, which has daily Federal Register updates and other nifty features. Wayne talked to me about the site in this podcast; there is also a 10KC Facebook page and a Twitter feed. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for the public to keep an eye on the regulatory state. Of course, agencies and OMB should already be doing this already. Since they aren’t, CEI is doing it for them.
  • Sam Patterson compares the size of the 2011 Federal Register to a lengthy reading list of classic books totaling about 7.3 million words. How do they compare? “[Y}ou’d have to read every single one of these books ten times over to achieve the same word count that was added to the Federal Register in a single year.”
  • Also worth noting: in the publishing industry, a manuscript page has 250 words. Or at least it’s counted that way; every page is different. So a 200-page manuscript is considered a 50,000-word book. The average Federal Register page has about 1,000 words. Patterson used 900 words per page to err on the side of caution. Using his numbers, a paperback edition of the Federal Register would be about 292,000 pages instead of 81,000.
  • It’s not pornography, it’s the TSA: “’When Bruch reached into Russell’s groin area he ‘lifted up to feel,’ ‘ wrote 9th Circuit Judge Margaret McKeown in the opinion.”
  • Having solved all of Indiana’s other problems, state Rep. Randy Frye wants to criminalize novelty lighters.
  • Jim Gattuso and Diane Katz list the ten worst federal rules of 2011. There are some doozies.