Licensing Rules Up For Discussion

Dreaming of a job as a boiler operator, dentist? Gov. Greg Gianforte wants to explore making the path into those the rest of the state’s 50 licensed professions easier for Montanans by streamlining licensing standards.

The catch? Getting professional associations and the state’s 176,000 licensed workers, many of whom like the rules the way they are, on board. To that end, the governor has assembled legislators, state agency heads and industry association representatives onto a Licensing Reform Task Force in an attempt to build support for licensing changes ahead of next year’s legislative session.

Gianforte, a Republican, has long argued that bureaucratic inefficiencies around the licensing process prevent many working age Montanans from finding jobs.

“We have 100,000 people sitting on the sidelines,” Gianforte said at the task force’s inaugural meeting on Feb. 10. “So you can help us with this. We can and must tear down barriers to employment to grow our labor force.”

The group hasn’t outlined which specific parts of the licensure system it hopes to modify, but its 28 members represent a total of 18 industry associations, indicating which professions will have a voice in drafting legislation ahead of the 2027 session.

That list includes dentists, funeral directors and contractors. Associations from the health care industry, ranging from nurses to pharmacists to physician assistants, make up the plurality.

The state offers 233 distinct professional licenses, grouped into roughly 50 professional categories. An additional 25,000 workers have state-issued independent contractor certificates, which will also be examined by the task force.

Industry associations that represent licensed professions have typically argued in recent years that strict licensure requirements ensure a well-qualified labor force. Free market advocates have countered with allegations that licensure boards gatekeep industries and prevent fair competition.

Gianforte made similar pushes to relax licensing requirements in recent legislative sessions with mixed success. Though he signed licensure reform bills in the 2023 and 2025, debate over some of those policies revealed deep divides over seemingly banal professional distinctions.

2025’s House Bill 218, which would enable optometrists to perform certain surgeries currently authorized for ophthalmologists, spurred rigorous debate. Its hearing in the House Business and Labor Committee lasted one hour and 45 minutes. In its Senate committee, the hearing lasted two hours.

One of the bill’s opponents, Rep. Courtney Sprunger, R-Kalispell, worried that letting medical professionals with less training expand their scope of practice would lead to worse patient care. She said during debate on the floor of the House of Representatives that she credits an ophthalmologist with saving her mother’s life.

“She had ocular melanoma. He was certified to diagnose that. He saved her life. Had it been someone else who didn’t know what they were looking for, she would have died,” Sprunger said.

But bill sponsor Ed Buttrey, R-Great Falls, argued the legislation permitted optometrists to perform only the procedures they had been trained in. He said the policy shift would increase rural health care access and accused ophthalmologists of gatekeeping.

“If you haven’t figured out what this is about, it’s about turf. The procedures proposed in this bill for optometrists are currently only performed by ophthalmologists in Montana, and these are the folks that are opposing the bill,” Buttrey said during the House floor debate. “So this is about competition.”

HB 218 ultimately passed the Legislature with bipartisan support and received Gov. Greg Gianforte’s signature on April 16, 2025.

During the 2023 session, Gianforte tasked Lt. Gov. Kristen Juras with cutting bureaucratic red tape to boost the private sector. She backed a package of 159 bills intended to streamline redundant laws and sunset outdated statutes, some of which addressed professional licensing. That year’s Senate Bill 166, for instance, exempted hair-cutters who worked in detention centers and prisons from needing a state barber license. House Bill 87 contained a more sweeping overhaul of reform across all public licensing boards. The Legislature passed about 90% of the 159 bills.

But, much to the governor’s dismay, a long line of dissenters picked apart his central licensure reform bill, House Bill 152, during its first hearing. The Montana Medical Association, for example, worried changes shifting licensing authority into the labor department bureaucracy would erode the authority of medical practitioners to review alleged misconduct by their peers.

Katiana Stutzer, representing the Montana Athletic Trainers Association, said it removed the wording that differentiates certified athletic trainers from nonlicensed professionals and other health care workers.

“Eliminating this title protection places the health and welfare of Montana citizens at risk while not increasing clarity or efficiency necessarily of the laws enacted to ensure Montanans have access to the highest level of quality health care,” Stutzer said.

Jack McBroom, representing electrical workers unions, said the bill reduced the qualifications necessary to be an electrician.

“We don’t need our homes burning down because someone that didn’t have the proper qualification, or do the test properly, failed to do their job and caused a fire,” McBroom said.

At a press conference a few days after the hearing, Gianforte called the industry opposition a “comment on human nature.”

“Everyone hates red tape unless it’s their red tape,” Gianforte said. By the time the bill passed out of its first committee, amendments had slashed it from 234 pages to five. It ultimately died in the Senate.

Now the governor is courting workers and industry associations well before the session.

Jen Hensley, a longtime lobbyist who also advocated against the 2023 legislation, now sits on the newly created task force. She maintains that the licensing requirements currently on the books were put into place after careful consideration. She also said that the professional associations she lobbies for, including physician’s assistants, occupational therapists, speech language pathologists and optometrists, will want to retain control over their licensing process.

“They don’t want a bureaucrat deciding what a professional standard should be,” Hensley said.

Hensley also said she feels better about the new task force than she did about the governor’s push for reform in 2023.

“It’s doing what should have happened prior to the ‘23 session,” she said.

Task force chair Sarah Swanson, the commissioner of the state Department of Labor and Industry, said during its initial meeting that the task force will include four subcommittees, one focused on unwarranted barriers to entry and another on sunsetting outdated regulations. The other two will center on licenses in the construction and healthcare industries. Members of the task force also said they wanted a fifth subcommittee to examine professional requirements outside of those two fields.

In the past, Gianforte has created task forces in efforts to move the needle around challenging policy topics. He assembled a task force in 2022 to address affordable housing and another in 2024 to handle rising property taxes. Both produced packages of legislation that the governor and his allies shepherded through the legislative process.

Interested members of the public can submit comments or sign up to receive updates about the task force on a dedicated webpage. The group has its next full-group meeting set for April 13. It plans to present final recommendations to Gianforte in September.