Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

26. Trade · Minor · Contested — excluded from counts

Reform occupational licensing to ease trade adjustment

Attempted

806 26. Trade · from “The Case for Free Trade”

“Trade adjustment could be made easier by regulatory reforms to remove its attendant friction. These include: … Occupational licensing reform”

What has happened

  1. Attempted

    Executive Order 14267, "Reducing Anti-Competitive Regulatory Barriers", is the only instrument in the window that names licensing. Section 3(a)(iv) requires every agency head, in consultation with the FTC Chairman and the Attorney General, to identify regulations that "create or facilitate licensure or accreditation requirements that unduly limit competition", to recommend rescission or modification within 70 days, and to justify keeping any that are anti-competitive by design; the FTC was to run a 40-day public request for information and OMB to decide what enters the Unified Regulatory Agenda. Twenty-one Federal Register documents cite the order as of 2026-09-01 — DEA registration and ordering rules, NRC licensing modernization, SBA size standards, CMS Medicare rules and an Education Department accreditation rule — and not one of them touches occupational licensing. Nothing has changed for a licensed trade.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • Contested Recommendation from “The Case for Free Trade”.
  • Boundary flagged for the consistency pass. attempted rests on EO 14267 naming licensure as a target; the alternative is not started, because occupational licensing is overwhelmingly state law, the EO reaches only federal regulations, and none of its twenty-one implementing documents concerns an occupation. The two readings are different rungs.
  • Negative searches: Federal Register full text "occupational licensing" since 2025-01-20 returns ten documents, all of them notices of meetings of the South Carolina Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; "licensure" returns 172, overwhelmingly SBIC license issuances and drug-distributor collections. Both forms were tried, singular and plural.
Action
other
Object
Occupational licensing rules
ID
2113