This Week in Ridiculous Regulations

An earthquake killed at least 20,000 people in Turkey. President Biden delivered the State of the Union speech. Meanwhile, agencies issued new regulations ranging from cooking products to rotocraft.

On to the data:

• Agencies issued 65 final regulations last week, after 63 the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 35 minutes.
• With 335 final regulations so far in 2023, agencies are on pace to issue 2,991 final regulations this year.
• For comparison, there were 3,168 new final regulations in 2022 and 3,257 in 2021.
• Agencies issued 34 proposed regulations in the Federal Register last week, after 52 the previous week.
• With 226 proposed regulations so far in 2023, agencies are on pace to issue 2,018 proposed regulations this year.
• For comparison, there were 2,044 new proposed regulations in 2022 and 2,094 in 2021.
• Agencies published 460 notices last week, after 510 notices the previous week.
• With 2,480 notices so far in 2023, agencies are on pace to issue 22,143 notices this year.
• For comparison, there were 22,505 notices in 2022 and 20,018 in 2021.
• Last week, 1,544 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,834 pages the previous week.
• The average Federal Register issue in 2023 contains 325 pages.
• With 9,103 pages so far, the 2023 Federal Register is on pace for 81,277 pages.
• For comparison, the 2022 Federal Register totals 80,756 pages; 2021’s is 74,352 pages. The all-time record adjusted page count (subtracting skips, jumps, and blank pages) is 96,994, set in 2016.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. There are five such rules so far in 2023, none in the last week.
• This is on pace for 47 economically significant regulations in 2023.
• For comparison, there were 43 economically significant rules in 2022 and 26 in 2021.
• The total estimated cost of 2023’s economically significant regulations so far is for $55.64 billion to $78.51 billion, according to numbers provided by the agencies themselves.
• For comparison, the running cost tally for 2022’s economically significant rules is for net costs of $45.28 billion to $78.05 billion. In 2021 net costs ranged from $13.54 billion to $19.36 billion. The exact numbers depend on discount rates and other assumptions.
• There were no regulations meeting the broader definition of “significant” last week, after six the previous week.
• So far this year, there are 25 new regulations meeting the broader definition of “significant.” That is on pace for 607 significant regulations in 2023.
• For comparison, there were 255 such new regulations in 2022 and 387 in 2021.
• So far in 2023, 79 new regulations affect small businesses, on pace for 705. Five of them are significant, on pace for 45.
• For comparison, in 2022 there were 912 rules affecting small businesses, 70 of them significant. 2021’s totals were 912 rules affecting small businesses, 101 of them significant.

Highlights from last week’s new regulations:

• Audits for Rural Utilities Service grant recipients.
• Communications supply chain national security threats.
• Spanish mackerel catch limits.
• Standardized procedures for state highway safety grant programs.
• Energy conservation rules for refrigerators and related products.
• A correction to energy testing rules for cooking products.
• New address correction notice procedures from the Postal Service.
• Visible emissions in Texas.
• Assistance to foreign atomic energy activities.
• Updates to the Federal Reserve credit extensions and reserve requirements, as part of the Fed’s recent increase to the federal funds rate.
• Training, checking, and testing experimental aircraft.
• A correction to the Federal Trade Commissions’s upcoming changes to merger notification requirements.
• Harpin protein peptides.
• Rotocraft certification.
• Recordkeeping for swaps dealers.
• Criminal Antitrust Anti-Retaliation Act procedures.
• Flugzeugbau.
• Bulk cyber systems.
  
  

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