Late on Monday, January 27, 2025, President Trump fired National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, a Biden appointee who “had used the agency to expand workers' rights,” NPR reported. He also fired Democratic board member Gwynne Wilcox “in an unprecedented move.” Wilcox's ouster left the board with two members, “short of the quorum it needs to adjudicate even routine cases.” The National Labor Relations Act says board members can be removed “for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause.”
The NLRB oversees most private-sector union matters in the U.S. Under Abruzzo it had won a board ruling outlawing mandatory “captive audience” meetings, and it faced more than two dozen lawsuits from companies, including SpaceX and Amazon, arguing that the agency's structure gives it unchecked power to shape and enforce labor law. SpaceX was founded by Trump adviser Elon Musk.
The paralysis lasted nearly a year. The board was without a three-member quorum, “and thus unable to issue decisions,” until the Senate confirmed Trump nominees Scott Mayer and James Murphy on December 18, 2025. They were sworn in on January 7, 2026, along with General Counsel Crystal Carey, who came from a management-side law firm. The new Republican majority is expected to “clarify and ultimately unwind many of the Biden Administration-era Board decisions.”
Related rules have also moved in employers' favor. The Biden-era 2023 joint-employer rule never took effect: a federal court in Texas vacated it in March 2024, and the board withdrew its appeal in July 2024. In February 2026 the Trump-era board formally reinstated the narrower 2020 rule without notice and comment. Separately, the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division stopped enforcing rules against misclassifying employees as independent contractors, according to Good Jobs First.
Correction (October 2, 2026): This entry was previously dated February 1, 2025; the firings were on January 27, 2025, and the date has been corrected. The entry also said Trump reversed the joint-employer rule and the independent-contractor rule. In fact, a court vacated the 2023 joint-employer rule and the board abandoned its appeal before Trump took office; his board formally reinstated the 2020 rule in February 2026. The contractor change was a Labor Department enforcement decision, not an NLRB action. Claims that DOGE cut NLRB staff and budget, that thousands of cases were frozen, that Starbucks and Apple faced pending cases, and figures on misclassification losses and union wage premiums were not supported by the entry's sources and were removed. The entry now notes that the board regained a quorum in January 2026.