Trump's NLRB Doesn't Want to Investigate Worker Complaints [View all]

[Celerity]

The agency tasked with protecting workers is making it harder for them to submit complaints and letting employers break the law.

https://prospect.org/2026/04/15/trump-national-labor-relations-board-nlrb-investigate-worker-complaints/


Credit: Creativeye99/iStock

Last year, the number of workers covered by a union contract rose to 16.5 million, the highest raw total since 2009. In theory, this increased representation should mean the National Labor Relations Board—the federal agency that protects the right of private-sector employees to organize, and adjudicates alleged unfair labor practices (ULPs)—will be awfully busy. For an agency that has long suffered from a workforce and inflation-adjusted budget decline, the growth of the organized workforce should coincide with agency leadership pushing for more capacity and resources to alleviate its backlog and manage new cases in a timely fashion.

This, however, is antithetical to the Trump administration’s bilious anti-worker animus—witness the desire to put federal workers “in trauma”—as well as its general hostility to the federal administrative state. So, rather than taking steps to handle its current caseload, NLRB General Counsel Crystal Carey is taking a different tack: choking off the number of cases that reach the agency by increasing the burden of filing complaints in the first place. As a result, employers who violate labor law are getting off scot-free.

Even before Carey started this, the NLRB was in a severe capacity crisis. The agency, which was founded with the explicit intent to be stronger in protecting worker rights and more encouraging of good-faith bargaining compared to its predecessor, was an early target of the administration’s attacks on independent agencies. The Board had been without a quorum for the majority of last year following President Trump’s unprecedented firing of Democratic board member Gwynne Wilcox, preventing the agency from issuing rulings until two Trump appointees were confirmed in December. (By statute, the NLRB requires three of its five board slots to be filled to make binding rulings.) As a result, cases piled up, peaking at 591 in January 2026—and that’s just the ones awaiting a final decision from the Board. The agency also has 17,000 open ULP investigations, more than half of which are over six months old, according to acting Associate General Counsel William Cowen.

The agency is ill-equipped to handle such a backlog, let alone the influx of cases that will likely accompany more than 460,000 additional union-represented workers. The administration has not shown any intention to change that. Last year, with full knowledge of the backlog they faced, the NLRB requested funding for just 1,152 full-time employees for fiscal year 2026 (FY26). This is nearly a hundred fewer employees than the prior year and 500 fewer than requested a decade ago for FY16, despite a higher combined intake of ULP and representation cases. To make matters worse, since Trump’s inauguration the agency had lost 196 employees, counterbalanced by only seven hires, according to the latest data from the Office of Personnel Management in January. Funding levels tell a similar story. Trump’s NLRB requested $285 million for FY26, down $14 million from FY25. This is a significant decrease from the FY16 budget in real terms, which would be over $381 million in today’s dollars.

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