This Week in Ridiculous Regulations

Federal regulators enjoyed a short work week due to Columbus Day, but still published more than 1,300 Federal Register pages with new regulations ranging from hobbies to people who live in apartments.

On to the data:

  • Last week, 53 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 69 the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every three hours and 10 minutes.
  • With 2,970 final regulations published so far in 2016, the federal government is on pace to issue 3,731 regulations in 2016. Last year’s total was 3,406 regulations.
  • Last week, 1,324 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 2,096 pages the previous week.
  • Currently at 71,103 pages, the 2016 Federal Register is on pace for 89,326 pages. This would exceed the 2010 Federal Register’s all-time record adjusted page count of 81,405.
  • Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. 26 such rules have been published so far in 2016, one in the last week.
  • The running compliance cost tally for 2016’s economically significant regulations ranges from $4.52 billion to $6.72 billion.
  • 228 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published this year.
  • So far in 2016, 514 new rules affect small businesses; 89 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

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