This Week in Ridiculous Regulations

The 2017 Federal Register had another sub-thousand page week, though it is still already more than 18,000 pages long. Besides the usual Federal Aviation Administration and Coast Guard procedural rules that are regularly published, new regulations from the last week range from inflation to hammerhead sharks.

On to the data:

  • Last week, 51 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 63 the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every three hours and 18 minutes.
  • Federal agencies have issued 845 final regulations in 2017. At that pace, there will be 2,975 new final regulations. Last year’s total was 3,853 regulations.
  • Last week, 978 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 995 pages the previous week.
  • The 2017 Federal Register totals 18,064 pages. It is on pace for 63,606 pages. The all-time record adjusted page count (which subtracts skips, jumps, and blank pages) is 96,994, set last year. The unadjusted count was 97,110 pages.
  • Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. Seven such rules have been published this year, none in the last week.
  • The running compliance cost tally for 2016’s economically significant regulations ranges from $6.8 billion to $13.2 billion.
  • Agencies have published 108 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” so far this year.
  • In 2017, 182 new rules affected small businesses; 37 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.