CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

This week in the world of regulation:

• Last week, 71 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. There were 83 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 22 minutes — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
• All in all, 2,314 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
• If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,704 new final rules.
• Last week, 1,414 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 50,130 pages.
• At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 78,821 pages, which would be good for fifth all time. The current record is 81,405 pages, set in 2010.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. No such rules were published last week, for a total of 22 so far in 2013.
• The total estimated compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $5.78 billion to $10.39 billion.
• So far, 203 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
• So far this year, 432 final rules affect small business; 55 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

• The town of Conneaut, Ohio sits on Lake Erie, right by the Pennsylvania-Ohio border. Because its beach very much resembles Normandy’s in France, history enthusiasts have annually reenacted the D-Day invasion since 1999. For this year’s August 16-17 reenactment, the Coast Guard issued a detailed regulation establishing a safety zone surrounding the area of amphibious invasion and vintage airplane flyovers.
• In June, the EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration jointly published regulations for heavy-duty engines and off-road vehicles. Due to adverse comments received, the agencies are rescinding parts of the rule.
• The EPA published its annual standards for how much bio-fuels cars will be required to use in 2013.
• The FCC is adjusting its forfeitures and fines for inflation.

For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.