In a ground shaking change, the Trump administration has redefined what constitutes a “profession.” This unexplained and senseless decision not only demeans the work of a whole body of trained professionals, but threatens the potential reimbursement or financial help provided by the federal government to people who wish to pursue various careers.
Nursing, shockingly, is no longer included on the official list of professions, which will potentially affect thousands of current nursing students and students considering going into nursing. This change is simply nuts. There is a nationwide nursing shortage in America, and any policy change that reduces the incentives to pursue nursing as a career is misguided and dangerous.
Nursing is not the only career no longer classified as “professional.” The list includes: Physician Assistants, Physical Therapists, Audiologists, Architects, Accountants, Educators, and Social Workers.
The implementation of the new standards will begin in July of 2026.
It’s impossible to determine what stimulated this change in policy. Clearly, a bias against providing government subsidies for education in certain professions is at play, but practitioners in the now-excluded professions are the most likely to generate income and taxes to offset any government spending, so financial-savings logic doesn’t make any sense. Maybe suspicion of elitism is driving this policy change.
For some inexplicable reason, American education policy has turned against education itself. Learning how to think is more important than mastering facts, and if not properly cultivated results in social and civic ignorance, fertilizes dangerous rumors, conspiracy theories and crackpot ideas. Becoming a professional educator is about learning how to teach people critical thinking skills. Perhaps this is what frightens the Trump administration: people who can think.
Would you want to use an accountant or architect you did not consider a professional? We think not. Designation as a professional indicates an important level of attainment in knowledge, skill and experience.
There’s a disturbing meanness in all this, a determination to relegate certain people and professions to a lower rung on the ladder, as if reducing the status of some professions will elevate the status of others. Such nonsense is unfortunately now federal policy, and we can witness similar recklessness in the Department of Health and Human Services, the newly renamed “War Department” and other governmental agencies. It reflects an outdated view of human society as appropriately consisting of the powerful and the weak, with the powerful dominating the weak. This is neo-Darwinist thinking, and leads to widespread inequity.
It may be that stimulating discontent is the point, to “flood the zone” with so much dissonant, destructive policy that society begins to unravel, thus providing an excuse for authoritarianism to expand and exert itself more explicitly. We see this happening in the Caribbean where massive American military force is being used in lieu of legitimate police action to intercept and blow up alleged drug smugglers in small boats, killing close to 100 people without due process, more than 1,000 miles from American shores. Meanwhile, on the American mainland, immigrants are being profiled and brutally harassed by ICE agents.
How we classify people and professions has an effect, and when any group or profession is “downgraded” it demeans and objectifies, turning the respected into the looked-down-upon. These policy decisions have real impacts on real people who are pursuing career paths that may represent their passion, hope and desire to create and contribute to a better world. We need young people to pursue such work. Our government should be supportive, not destructive to their goals.
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