South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard announced an initiative this week that would ease the licensure requirements for professionals moving across state lines.
It’s a great bipartisan idea whose time has come.
“Excessive licensing raises the cost of entry — often prohibitively — for certain careers, locking many Americans out of good jobs. Uneven educational requirements, steep fees and long approval periods foreclose economic opportunity for those who need it most,” Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta and Daugaard wrote in a joint Wall Street Journal op-ed this week.
They added, “Excessive licensing creates barriers to job mobility. Americans don’t leave their skills behind when they move to a new state — but often they face the burden of obtaining new licenses. Hit especially hard are military spouses, who often must relocate as often as every two to three years. That shouldn’t mean losing their ability to make a living.”
To be clear: The call for loosened restrictions should not be mischaracterized as a call for the total abolition of all licensure requirements. Most proponents of easing, including Daugaard, still ask that, say, healthcare professionals or operators of heavy, specialized machinery prove that they are qualified for those roles.
The view that Acosta, Daugaard, and other like-minded individuals argue is that excessive requirements are not only a drag on the economy, but also a roadblock to employment, entrepreneurship, and innovation.
Recall that a study released this year by the nonprofit Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty found that the states that had a higher number of occupational licensing regulations for ten specific professions also suffered from lower employment in those same professional fields.
To the end of easing up the licensing burden placed on working professionals — and this is the real point of the Wall Street Journal op-ed — Daugaard announced South Dakota would introduce legislation to “establish a Compact for the Temporary Licensure of Professionals.”
As Daugaard and Acosta describe it, the bill would create a “multistate agreement that would change the presumption of occupational licensing from a roadblock to an open door. The compact would allow individuals who have been licensed in any profession or occupation in other participating states to receive, upon request within 30 days, an in-state temporary license.”
“That would allow professionals from compacting states to start working immediately and to pursue a permanent license while already employed. We have approached several governors of states neighboring South Dakota about the compact, and their reaction has been universally favorable,” they added.
Bring it on.
