CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

With most of December still to go, the 2015 Federal Register is already the seventh largest ever, going back to 1936. It remains on pace to set the all-time page count record. New regulations from the last week cover everything from catfish inspections to swap entities.

On to the data:

• Last week, 61 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 60 the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 48 minutes.
• So far in 2015, 3,146 final regulations have been published in the Federal Register. At that pace, there will be a total of 3,376 new regulations this year, fewer than the usual total of 3,500-plus.
• Last week, 1,247 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 2,227 pages the previous week.
• Currently at 75,917 pages, the 2015 Federal Register is on pace for 81,457 pages. This would break the all-time record set in 2010, with 81,405 pages.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. 34 such rules have been published so far this year, three in the past week.
• The total estimated compliance cost of 2015’s economically significant regulations ranges from $3.68 billion to $4.93 billion for the current year.
• 282 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published so far this year.
• So far in 2015, 518 new rules affect small businesses; 82 of them are classified as significant.

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• 42 pages of new catfish inspection rules.
• Lower assessment rates for onion growers in certain parts of Idaho and Oregon.
• Minimum wage requirements for federal contractors.
• A compliance guide for small businesses involved in federal acquisitions.
• The FCC continues to revise its spectrum auction policies.
• A new regulation for those of you thinking of fishing for bigeye tuna in Guam.
• Two new swap regulations, courtesy of the Dodd-Frank bill.

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