BHEC: Legislature funds NPDB checks, psychology exam design and Spanish LMSW exam; multiple bills affect licensure and practice

Daryl Spinks, executive director of the Texas Behavioral Health Executive Council, and Patrick Hyde, general counsel, summarized the 2025 legislative session and what it means for the agency and licensees.

Budget and agency funding: Spinks said the conference version of SB1, the state budget bill, provided BHEC with its baseline appropriations and additional, directed funds. The legislature appropriated about $400,000 to subscribe to the National Practitioner Data Bank continuous query service so the agency can run NPDB checks on renewal; Spinks said continuous queries were previously a practical impossibility without funding. The conference budget gave $125,000 to design an alternate psychology licensing exam and provided partial funding for agency staffing: the legislature funded roughly half of the six FTEs BHEC requested and directed the agency to hire attorneys first to reduce current caseloads in enforcement.

Spinks said the budget also included a surprise $200,000 rider directing BHEC to develop a Spanish-language licensing exam for the master’s-level social-work license (LMSW) and to deploy it by Sept. 1. He said the directive was not in either chamber’s initial bill and will present implementation challenges because BHEC must coordinate with exam owners and vendors.

Exam development: Spinks emphasized that the $125,000 is to design an alternate psychology exam, not to replace the Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP). He said the alternate exam is being explored because some stakeholders believe the EPPP may screen out otherwise qualified candidates and because workforce shortages increase interest in alternate licensing pathways. Spinks said BHEC staff will solicit stakeholder input during the design phase and that any decision to deploy the exam would require additional legislative authority and funding.

Major passed bills with direct impact: Hyde and Spinks identified several passed measures they said licensees should note: SB 912 (requires agencies to use online CE-management systems, discussed in the CE article), SB 571 (shortened the mandatory child‑abuse report window from 48 hours to 24 hours; see Section 1.3 for the text), SB 912/related CE law, SB 1080 (revises agency discretion on criminal-history–based license decisions), SB 1188 (requires disclosure and human review when AI is used in diagnosis or treatment planning), SB 1818 and House Bill 5629 (provisional licensing and military licensure adjustments for service members and spouses), SB 1401 (a mental-health professions pipeline program at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board), and SB 2587 (codifying the LPC associate title and authority to run criminal-history checks for LPC associates).

Failed or vetoed measures: Spinks said the counselor and social-work interstate compacts did not pass. An omnibus reciprocity bill that might have authorized reciprocal licensing was pared down in committee and left BHEC excluded from the version that advanced.

Other items: Spinks described House Bill 149, an AI sandbox program to permit supervised AI-enabled behavioral-health delivery under oversight of the Department of Information Resources and BHEC, and noted the legislature created a Health Professions Workforce Coordinating Council (HB 3801) focusing on workforce issues. Patrick Hyde highlighted SB 571’s change to the statutory mandatory-reporting deadline and urged licensees to consult the bill text and BHEC guidance.

Spinks and Hyde said staff will post bill links, guidance and rule texts and encouraged licensees to follow agency emails and the rulemaking page for implementation details. They cautioned that some items—such as alternate exams or Spanish translations—require coordination with third-party exam owners and additional legislative or vendor steps to implement.

No formal votes were taken during the listening hour; the session was informational and intended to summarize legislative outcomes and next steps for licensees and boards.