CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

Posted by Ryan Young. 

"Despite Friday’s Federal Register containing an impressive 853 pages, regulations continued their relatively slow pace. If this keeps up, 2014 will see the fewest regulations issued in decades.
On to the data:

• Last week, 55 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 52 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every three hours and 3 minutes.
• So far in 2014, 268 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 2,577 new regulations this year. This would be the lowest total in decades; this will likely change as the year goes on.
• Last week, 1,487 new pages were added to the Federal Register.
• Currently at 7,563 pages, the 2014 Federal Register is on pace for 72,722 pages, which would be the lowest total since 2007.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. Four such rules have been published so far this year, none of them in the past week.
• The total estimated compliance costs of 2014’s economically significant regulations is currently $1.6 million. They also affect several billion dollars of government spending.
• Thirty final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2014, 50 new rules affect small businesses; 8 of them are classified as significant.

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• New Zealand isn’t the only place where kiwifruit can grow. In fact, the federal government has a Kiwifruit Administrative Committee that you can follow on Twitter. The Committee works with growers in California, and announced on Friday that they are lowering their assessment rate.
• New energy conservation standards for dehumidifiers.
• NASA repealed some personnel reliability regulations that it deems obsolete. This is exactly the kind of regulatory housekeeping that every agency should do at least annually.
• The EPA approved regional haze standards for Minnesota and Michigan."