Think about the last time you drove through a tunnel, rode an elevator to the top floor, or checked your retirement account. You probably didn’t worry about the tunnel flooding, the building collapsing, or the numbers being wrong. That’s a lot of trust… but trust in what?

In the expertise of the professionals who stake their careers on the blueprints, site plans, and audits we rely on them for. And our confidence in that expertise comes down to one thing: a professional license.

Licensing is how we make sure the people doing the most consequential work are qualified to do it safely — and those qualifications are verified through rigorous education, a demanding examination, and supervised experience under a licensed professional (aka the Three E’s).

Behind every professional license is an independent licensing board — a small group of expert practitioners who know what their profession demands because they’ve spent their careers demonstrating it. Here’s what these boards do:

Licensing boards occupy a unique space: established by state law and accountable to the governor, but staffed by experts from the professions, not government bureaucrats. And critically, these boards pay for themselves — funded by the professions rather than taxpayers. It’s one of the most effective public-protection systems in state government, and yet it’s under pressure to be eliminated.

Here’s what’s at stake, and where we stand.