My gob is smacked by the overt mercenary cynicism here. They don‘t even pretend to care about possible negative consequences - in fact they don’t even really care about the positive consequences! This is a document written by and for ideological operatives. The “spring-cleaning” below seems to have very negative possible consequences, but the authors take a “credentials schmedentials” approach to considering such things:
Representative Examples of Spring-Cleaning Edits
Type of Spring-Cleaning Edit
Specific Regulation Example
Reduce barriers to entry into a licensed profession
Added an apprenticeship pathway for water-operator licenses in lieu of formal college education
Ease burden of licensure renewal
Reduced continuing education requirements for professions like nursing and plumbing
Expand professional scope of practice
Enabled occupational therapists to perform some duties previously limited to physical therapists; expanded pharmacist prescriptive authority
Empower business ownership
Removed the requirement that a plumber have two years of journeyman experience to own his own business
Limit supervision requirements on a licensed profession
Removed the limit on the number of physician assistants that may be overseen by a physician; expanded the duties that may be delegated to a dental assistant
Expand consumer choice
Eliminated the prohibition on selling alcoholic beverages at college sporting events; removed barriers to telehealth, enabling broader access to health-care services and access to specialists
Liberate academic institutions
Removed the requirement for the board of nursing to review and approve curriculum of nursing programs and deferred to existing accreditation pathways
The “occupational therapists and physical therapists are basically the same thing” is going to ruin a lot of people’s knees. And I wonder how long it’ll take for Iowa to quietly reimpose “plumbers must have requisite experience to run their own business”
Not sure how applicable Idaho's situation is to other states, because Idaho is one of the poorest states in the country.[a]
My quick take: Laws and regulations can be bad or even terrible... but sometimes they are good and necessary. For example, federal and state governments legally requiring everyone in the US to drive on the right side of the road has been beneficial for everyone.
What is almost always bad for everyone is the network of bureaucracies that grow and fester unchecked around the enactment and enforcement of laws and regulations.
We must distinguish between the two: laws/regulations vs. bureaucracies.
This seems to be operating from the premise that being the least regulated state is inherently good. I'm skeptical of this claim while acknowledging there are many poor regulations. The regulatory slash and burn they describe seems as likely to remove useful regulations that, gasp, make the state better than oppressive ones that make it worse.
The incentive structure that they're using makes it much more likely that a good regulation will be kept than a bad one; this isn't a blanket destruction of all regulation, rather a review process that requires agencies to periodically affirm that a regulation is still having positive impact.
Or that it is aligned with the current executive’s philosophy. This is pretty likely to create regulatory instability, but the article (as much of it that I could read) didn’t address that.
