We exist to protect the professional licensing that protects the public.

The Alliance for Responsible Professional Licensing is an advocacy coalition of the professional bodies and licensing boards representing 1.35 million engineers, architects, landscape architects, surveyors, and CPAs.

Professional licensing for high-stakes professions works, and the people closest to it know it — the public, the businesses that depend on it, and the practitioners who earned their credentials under it. And yet proposals to weaken, consolidate, or eliminate the systems that make it work keep advancing through state legislatures, often with no real scrutiny of what actually happens when those systems change.

That’s the gap ARPL was formed to fill. We bring the collective knowledge of organizations that have spent decades understanding what rigorous licensing requires and how to get it right, and we put that in front of the lawmakers and staff being asked to vote on proposals they don’t fully understand. We show up — in testimony, in the press, and in public — and we make the case.

Professional licensing works. It’s worth protecting. And it shouldn’t be dismantled in the name of reform — we’re here to make sure it isn’t.

Our Members

Alliance Leadership

James Cox

ARPL Executive Director

James Cox is ARPL Executive Director, leading the strategy and shared work of ARPL’s member organizations. He is also Vice President of State Advocacy & State Society Relations at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, focusing on the regulation of the CPA profession across a range of policy areas.