This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The Federal Register passed the 20,000-page last week, largely thanks to Friday’s 624-page edition. While most of the week’s new final regulations are either routine or procedural, they still range from rural phone calls to airplane batteries.
On to the data:
- Last week, 50 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 43 the previous week.
- That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every three hours and 22 minutes.
- Federal agencies have issued 938 final regulations in 2017. At that pace, there will be 2,895 new final regulations. Last year’s total was 3,853 regulations.
- Last week, 1,399 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 760 pages the previous week.
- The 2017 Federal Register totals 20,223 pages. It is on pace for 62,417 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 109 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” so far this year.
- In 2017, 204 new rules affected small businesses; 37 of them are classified as significant.
Highlights from selected final rules published last week:
- An EPA rule for emissions from Maryland’s incinerated medical waste.
- Recordkeeping requirements for rural phone calls.
- Installing lithium batteries on Viking Air airplanes.
- The General Conference Committee of the National Poultry Improvement Plan is holding a meeting on May 18.
For more data, see Ten Thousand Commandments and follow @10KC and @RegoftheDay on Twitter.