Could you provide a basis for that claim? I haven't heard it from the many people I know in those professions, who appear to respect their licensing bodies.
Don't know about other professions, but all of the proposals I've seen for licensing software engineers have been highly bogus (with lot of irrelevant material) and politically suspect.
The observations about the program in Texas mirror what I've seen in similar proposals in California. Namely, tests that concentrate on EE and hardware, with the occasional toss-in of some lifecycle garbage that is not state-of-the-art, nor uncontested in value. The IEEE was behind at least one effort to bring software engineering under its umbrella, which would explain why the state thinks software engineers need to know stuff like Kirchhoff's law and impedance matching. You can go your whole software engineering career without needing that.
The proponents don't seem to actually care about what's in the tests, just that they license people, get the fees, and make room for further power grabs. It's pretty unlikely that any improvement in software is going to spring from that kind of arrangement.
Licensing is just more "Keep beating the engineers until things improve" with a taste of "Nice career you have here, be a shame if something happened to it, right?" thrown in. We already get that in industry, why invite the government, too?
I get that you are unhappy about it but (no disrespect intended) that doesn't tell me anything. I know it's common, but the more exaggerated, emotional language I see, the less interest or faith I have in the reasoning and knowledge of the argument.
By and large they are either worthless or actively harmful.