The Occupational Board Reform Act (OBRA) was passed in 2018 and became effective in 2019. It requires legislative committees of jurisdiction to review all occupational licenses in the state, roughly 20% per year, on a five-year rotation. These reviews examine whether the licensing requirements are adequate or excessive by current standards. The committees then submit reports to the Clerk of the Legislature, where they are available for public review.
By way of reminder, almost all licensing regulations are created to protect the “health and safety” of the public. Occasionally, that purpose becomes protecting the “health, safety, and welfare” of the public. One of the things that OBRA reports are supposed to do is determine whether the regulations are fulfilling those purposes–or going beyond that purpose.
Each committee handles these reports slightly differently, and the way an individual committee reviews different licenses may vary. Most committees submit interim studies to provide notice that they will be looking at specific licenses. Then, they decide whether to hold hearings or conduct an internal staff study.
This is the fourth in a series of articles discussing the work of the various committees, now that they’ve completed their first five-year cycle and begun their second cycle.
For more context, see this post.
The Health and Human Services Committee did not start its reviews until 2020 (most committees began in 2019). Changes in staff, as well as several other issues in the HHS purview, resulted in the delay. However, then-Chair Sara Howard committed to beginning reviews in 2020 before she was term-limited out of the Legislature, and indeed, the Committee solicited data from all licensing boards under its authority in 2019 and then submitted reports based on that data in 2020. In 2024, more data were collected from each licensing board, so one assumes that reviews will be forthcoming again at the end of 2025 (the statute requires submission by December 15).
The HHS Committee has by far the most reviews to conduct of any committee of jurisdiction, covering a wide range of professions, from acupuncturists to physicians, funeral directors to veterinarians, and barbers to nursing home administrators. The list of occupational surveys (collected from the licensing boards in 2019 and 2024), as well as the reports from 2020, can be found online here.
While most of the licenses offered under the jurisdiction of the HHS Committee were recommended to remain unchanged, the reviews did suggest the elimination of at least one license — a “temporary emergency medical responder” license. This license was initially created in 2010 as a means of allowing providers to begin working while completing new national testing requirements, however since there are no providers working under that license anymore, the recommendation of the committee was to eliminate the temporary license.
The state may not see drastic changes in our licensing regime as a result of these reviews, but ongoing reviews, by themselves, are a positive. It helps to ensure that committee members and committee staff remain up-to-date on the occupational licenses that fall under the committee’s jurisdiction, and it requires at least some–both in the licensing agencies and within the legislative committees–to at least give periodic thought to whether licenses are doing what they’re supposed to, or whether modernization has deemed them less necessary than they once were.
