This Week in Ridiculous Regulations

As the Obama administration heads into its home stretch, agencies passed new rules ranging from gloves to canned vegetables.

On to the data:

  • Last week, 130 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 86 the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every one hour and 18 minutes.
  • With 3,756 final regulations published so far in 2016, the federal government is on pace to issue 3,817 regulations in 2016. Last year’s total was 3,406 regulations.
  • Last week, 3,264 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 2,284 pages the previous week.
  • Currently at 94,907 pages, the 2016 Federal Register is on pace for 96,060 pages. This well exceeds the 2010 Federal Register’s previous 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. 34 such rules have been published so far in 2016, none in the last week.
  • The running compliance cost tally for 2016’s economically significant regulations ranges from $24.1 billion to $37.1 billion.
  • 311 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published this year.
  • So far in 2016, 614 new rules affect small businesses; 105 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.