This Week in Ridiculous Regulations

The fall 2018 edition of the semi-annual Unified Agenda was released on Wednesday. It lists upcoming regulations from every rulemaking agency. This marks the first time since 2005 that document has been released on time; Wayne Crews has more here. Meanwhile, agencies issued new regulations ranging from orange containers to teacher technology.

On to the data:

• Last week, 79 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 51 the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 8 minutes.
• Federal agencies have issued 2,714 final regulations in 2018. At that pace, there will be 3,343 new final regulations. Last year’s total was 3,236 regulations.
• Last week, 1,349 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,337 pages the previous week.
• The 2018 Federal Register totals 53,066 pages. It is on pace for 65,353 pages. The all-time record adjusted page count (which subtracts 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. Five such rules have been published this year, none in the last week.
• The running compliance cost tally for 2018’s economically significant regulations is a net savings ranging from $348.9 million to $560.9 million.
• Agencies have published 88 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” so far this year.
• So far in 2018, 509 new rules affect small businesses; 22 of them are classified as significant. 

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• An implementation rule for the Privacy Act of 1974.
• Medical device classification rules for herpes lesion panels and arm tremor stimulators.
• Pricing changes for products where the U.S. Postal Service allows competition.
• Mail preparation.
• Fishing quota reporting requirements for fisherman affected by Hurricane Michael.
• The Education Department is repealing some outdated teacher technology regulations.
• Electronic royalty payments.
• Another regulation for preventing collisions at sea. That makes 577 such regulations since 1994; see them all here.
• The Deseret milkvetch is no longer on the endangered species list.
• Until now, it was illegal for the Agricultural Marketing Service to use email to send meeting notifications.
• Changing container requirements for oranges and grapefruit grown in Texas.

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