Category Archives: regulation

This week in the world of regulation:

• Last week, 96 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. This is up from 93 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every hour and 45 minutes — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
• All in all, 1,688 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
• If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,582 new final rules.
• Last week, 1,616 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 37,643 pages.
• At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 78,423 pages.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. One such rule was published last week, for a total of 14 so far in 2013.
• The total estimated compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $5.68 billion to $10.29 billion.
• So far, 118 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
• So far this year, 290 final rules affect small business; 25 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

• Between now and September 7, there will be a number of fireworks shows in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The federal government is establishing a safety zone in Lake Michigan near the events.
• New fine particulate matter air quality standards in Missouri and Kansas, courtesy of the EPA.
• The EPA also issued new emission standards for petroleum refineries.
• The Defense Department, General Services Administration, and NASA have jointly adopted quotas for contracting with small businesses owned by women.
• The Farm Credit Administration is revising its liquidity requirements.
• The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is revising its procedures for dealing with FOIA requests.

For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.

This week in the world of regulation:

• Last week, 93 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. This is up from 72 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every  hour and 48 minutes — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
• All in all, 1,592 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
• If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,522 new final rules.
• Last week, 1,536 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 36,027 pages.
• At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 78,320 pages.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. No such rules were published for the third consecutive week, for a total of 13 so far in 2013.
• The total estimated compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $5.58 billion to $10.19 billion.
• So far, 109 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
• So far this year, 291 final rules affect small business; 26 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

• The federal government is altering drawbridge schedules in New York City; Boston; Stillwater, Minnesota; Westport, Connecticut; Stockton, California; Norfolk, Virginia; and Lawrence, New York.
• If you make alcoholic beverages between 18 and 23 percent alcohol by volume and contain artificial coloring, you should be aware of this regulation.
• The Affordable Care Act contains an excise tax on tanning. It came into effect on Tuesday.
• The EPA is revising its “approved motor vehicle emissions budgets” for Lima, Ohio.
• The EPA is also revising its ambient air quality standards for Northern Virginia.
• A new FCC rule takes 7 pages to define “auditory assistance device.”
• Not to be outdone, the FDIC takes 26 pages to define “Predominantly engaged in activities that are financial in nature or incidental thereto.”
• Winemakers may now print a wine’s alcohol content on a label other than the brand label if they wish.

For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.

This week in the world of regulation:

• Last week, 72 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. This is up from 61 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 20 minutes — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
• All in all, 1,499 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
• If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,463 new final rules.
• Last week, 1,563 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 34,491 pages.
• At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 78,389 pages.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. No such rules were published for the second consecutive week, for a total of 13 so far in 2013.
• The total estimated compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $5.58 billion to $10.19 billion.
• So far, 108 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
• So far this year, 265 final rules affect small business; 23 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

• Non-economists have been pushing Buy-American provisions for years. It turns out there are also non-economists in the Indian Affairs Department, since a new rule requires the government to set aside a certain amount of procurement contracts for Indian-owned businesses.
• There is a drawbridge in Tacoma, Washington that spans the City Waterway. The federal government sets its schedule.
• The federal government sells pecan insurance. A new rule corrects errors made in a previous rule from February.
• The EPA is revising motor vehicle emissions budgets for Cincinnati suburbs in Kentucky.
• More regulations for avoiding collisions at sea.
• The FCC issued new guidelines for safe levels of exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields.

For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.

If anything good came out of the Bush 43 years, it’s that his two-term onslaught of spending, deficits, regulation, and rapid government growth finally disabused many people of the notion that the GOP will actually enact limited-government policies. It was during this time that George Will, who had long vacillated between Hamiltonian and Madisonian phases throughout his career, rediscovered his inner James Madison. If anything, he has become even more classically liberal during the Obama years. That’s why I was especially pleased that in his latest column, he praises CEI’s own Wayne Crews and the new edition of Ten Thousand Commandments:

Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has recently published his “Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State.” This year’s 20th-anniversary edition notes that regulation, the “hidden tax,” costs almost $2 trillion not counted among the official federal outlays. Using mostly government data, Crews concludes:

The cost of regulations ($1.806 trillion) is now more than half the size of the federal budget and 11.6 percent of GDP. This costs $14,768 per U.S. household, equal to 23 percent of the average household income of $63,685. Regulatory compliance costs exceed the combined sum of income taxes paid by corporations ($237 billion) and individuals ($1.165 trillion). Then add $61 billion in on-budget spending by agencies that administer regulations.

Crews’s “Anti-Democracy Index” measures “the ratio of regulations issued by agencies relative to laws passed by Congress.” In 2012, the index was 29, meaning that 29 times more regulations were issued by agencies than there were laws passed by Congress. “This disparity,” Crews writes, “highlights a substantial delegation of lawmaking power to unelected agency officials.”

The entire column is well worth reading. See also a recent Wall Street Journal editorial on Ten Thousand Commandments, and, of course, the study itself.

This week in the world of regulation:

• During the holiday-shortened week, 61 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. This is down from 68 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 45 minutes — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
• All in all, 1,427 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
• If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,449 new final rules.
• Last week, 1,162 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 32,928 pages.
• At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 78,400 pages.
• 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 13 so far in 2013.
• The total estimated compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $5.58 billion to $10.19 billion.
• So far, 102 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
• So far this year, 254 final rules affect small business; 23 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

• A new rule from U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Treasury Department implements parts of the recent U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement.
• The federal government has a Citrus Administrative Committee. A new Agricultural Marketing Service regulation “requires all fresh citrus handlers to provide the Committee with a list of all growers whose fruit they handled each season.”
• Cotton growers are required to pay the AMS $2.20 per bale they produce, same as in 2012. A bale weighs 500 pounds.
• The Fish and Wildlife Service is adding 38 new species from Hawaii to the endangered species list, delisting one plant species, and reaffirmed the listing of two others.

For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.

The cost of government is far more than it taxes and spends. Regulatory costs count, too. One of our biggest jobs here at CEI is to make that point. As long as the regulatory state continues to grow, this becomes more important with each passing year. Fortunately, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review’s editorial board agrees, as they opined yesterday:

The Competitive Enterprise Institute ( cei.org) says that regulating rather than legislating pays for programs with private-sector resources rather than tax dollars. CEI says regulation is “off-budget taxation” — and business owners, workers and families ultimately foot the bill through higher taxes and/or lower wages.

CEI’s new 20th-anniversary edition of its “Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State” estimates yearly compliance costs at $1.8 trillion — exceeding half of total federal expenditures for the first time, as well as Canada’s or Mexico’s GDP. And at $14,678 per family, red tape trails only housing among typical household costs.

Read the whole thing here. See also the Wall Street Journal’s take here, and the new Ten Thousand Commandments report here.

This week in the world of regulation:

• Last week, 68 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. This is down from 71 new final rules the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 28 minutes — 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
• All in all, 1,366 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
• If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,462 new final rules.
• Last week, 2,598 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 31,766 pages. This is roughly double the average pace.
• At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 78,629 pages.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. One such rule was published last week (the first since April 18), for a total of 13 so far in 2013.
• The total estimated compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $5.58 billion to $10.19 billion.
• So far, 94 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
• So far this year, 246 final rules affect small business; 21 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

• This week’s economically significant regulation is part of the health care bill. It extends the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP) program. Insurers who take on patients enrolled in the program are subjected to strict price controls, but in return the government is spending up to $5 billion to make up the shortfall. As I noted earlier, some insurers are likely to reject PCIP enrollees altogether, which would have the unintended consequence of making harder, not easier, for people with pre-existing conditions to get insurance. Since the $5 billion is government spending and not compliance costs, and the rule refuses to quantify administrative costs, I am scoring this rule as zero-cost in our running tally.
• This is only a proposed rule, but still worth noting. New airworthiness directives for Segelflugzeugbau sailplanes are on the way. Fun bit of trivia: Segelflugzeugbau has made 35 appearances in the Federal Register since 1994.
• Only the tax code is more complicated than America’s immigration policy. Fortunately, the State Department is simplifying things a bit for immigrants by eliminating Form OF-224. It is used for “recording an alien’s entitlement to an immigrant visa classification.”
• The federal government has a Colorado Potato Administrative Committee. It is modifying its membership structure.
• New critical habitat for umtanum desert buckwheat and Chite Bluffs bladderpod.
• The FCC is citing the Communications Act of 1934 to justify its regulation of Internet browsers. This should end well.

For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.