Megalextoria

As the Federal Register climbed above 87,000 pages for the first time in its 81-year history, agencies issued new rules ranging from landfills to movie theaters.

On to the data:

• Last week, 65 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 85 the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every two hours and 35 minutes.
• With 3,454 final regulations published so far in 2016, the federal government is on pace to issue 3,722 regulations in 2016. Last year’s total was 3,406 regulations.
• Last week, 2,006 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 2,292 pages the previous week.
• Currently at 87,297 pages, the 2016 Federal Register is on pace for 94,071 pages. This would exceed the 2010 Federal Register’s previous all-time record adjusted page count of 81,405.
• Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. 30 such rules have been published so far in 2016, one in the last week.
• The running compliance cost tally for 2016’s economically significant regulations ranges from $23.5 billion to $36.2 billion.
• 277 final rules meeting the broader definition of “significant” have been published this year.
• So far in 2016, 580 new rules affect small businesses; 99 of them are classified as significant.

Highlights from selected final rules published last week:

• The federal government charges a fee to everyone who flies through U.S. airspace, even if their flights neither take off nor land on American soil. A new rule updates those fees.
• Another type of opiate is being classified as a Schedule I controlled substance, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s most severe category.
• A new Medicaid rule will increase state and federal spending by a combined $191 million in 2016, and $209 in 2017.
• The Environmental Protection Agency is implementing new reporting requirements for greenhouse gas emissions for petroleum and natural gas systems. The estimated cost is roughly $110,000 per year.
• Washington State requires permits for landfills. The EPA has determined that the state’s policies are “adequate.”
• Closed captioning in movie theaters.
• Two new regulations related to the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill

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

This first appeared at Competitive Enterprise Institute.