CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

Along with last week’s usual slew of final regulations covering everything from power plants to televisions, an additional 55 proposed regulations also hit the books.

On to the data:

• Last week, 58 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 68 new regulations the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 54 minutes.
• So far in 2015, 674 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 2,856 new regulations this year, which would be nearly 1,000 fewer rules than the usual total.
• Last week, 1,398 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,157 pages the previous week.
• Currently at 16,531 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 70,047 pages.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. Six such rules have been published so far this year, one in the past week.
• The total estimated compliance cost of 2015’s economically significant regulations ranges from $693 million to $746 million for the current year.
• Sixty-two final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2015, 137 new rules affect small businesses; 23 of them are classified as significant.

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• The federal government has a housing trust fund. A new regulation “implements a statutory prohibition against the Enterprises [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] passing the cost of such allocations through to the originators of loans they purchase or securitize[.]”
• Fracking on federal and Indian lands.
• If you’ve ever been involved in a car crash involving attenuator trucks deployed at construction sites, you should be aware of a new regulation from the Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
• Now that it’s 2015, the Agricultural Marketing Service is allowing importers to file some of their required reports electronically.
• The Farm Credit Administration moved two of its field offices.
• Another EPA regulation aimed at coal-fired power plants.
• EnergyGuide labels on televisions.

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