Even Crystal S. Carey, Republican general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, the federal agency that adjudicates labor-management disputes, thinks President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are screwing up her agency.
Carey, who before Trump appointed her general counsel was a partner at the union-busting law firm Morgan Lewis, didn’t put it exactly that way. In her prepared testimony Thursday before the Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions subcommittee of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, Carey took care to explain that the NLRB’s enormous case backlog rose to “unprecedented levels” under President Joe Biden. But that’s because congressional Republicans have been starving the NLRB of funds for 15 years, even as filings with the NLRB rise rapidly as American workers awaken to the fact that they possess labor rights.
Trump asked Congress for only $285 million to fund the NLRB next year, down from $302 million when Trump entered office. Carey protested the NLRB’s underfunding but blamed it on neither Trump nor congressional Republicans. She did, however, say that she’d just learned the House Republican appropriations bill lowered Trump’s $285 million budget request by nearly one-third, to $200 million. That, Carey said, is “far below what we will need.”
Under Trump, NLRB staffing has fallen to 1,151. As I noted earlier this week, there are graduating high school classes bigger than that. (“My high school graduating class was bigger than that!” Arnie Arnesen told me when I appeared Wednesday on her podcast.) In her prepared statement, Carey said:
We continue to receive new charges every day, at record pace, all while we are 31 percent understaffed compared to 10 years ago when we experienced similar case intake. We are excited to have hiring authority to onboard nearly 100 new employes to the field this fiscal year. However, that number does not approach the number of employees we need to build an efficient and sustainable case processing system and fully staff our regional offices.
Trump was president for four of the 10 years when NLRB funding was declining. And while it’s lovely to hear that the NLRB has a green light to hire 100 new employees, the agency has lost nearly that many (82) since Trump entered office, and it’s pledged to keep staffing levels static in fiscal year 2027. Should Congress further reduce NLRB funding to $200 million, Carey said, the NLRB will lose somewhere between 300 and 460 employees. That would shrink the NLRB’s staffing to somewhere between 851 and 691. The latter figure is smaller than the size of this year’s graduating class at McCaskey High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Even as its staff is dwindling, Carey said later in the hearing, “We also, quite frankly, are going to have some space issues. There’s been a lot of GSA realignments over the past five years that have reduced a significant amount of space for us.” The GSA, or General Services Administration, allocates and manages office space for federal agencies. As I’ve noted before, much of the GSA’s time these days is devoted to selling extremely valuable real estate to private buyers at fire-sale prices in the name, preposterously, of thrift. Most recently, the GSA sold Washington’s Liberty Loan building, situated beside the Tidal Basin, for $17 million. That’s $98 per square foot, or about one-fifth the average sale price for a D.C. office building in the current depressed real estate market.
Carey didn’t mention that Trump deliberately denied the NLRB a quorum for his first 11 months in office by firing the Democratic chair, in violation of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act and that same year’s Supreme Court decision in Humphrey’s Executor (which the Supreme Court has signaled its intention to overturn for every independent agency except the Federal Reserve). Trump then waited until December 2025 to fill two vacancies and restore a quorum. While much of the NLRB’s work is conducted out of regional offices, putting the Washington-based NLRB on ice for a year didn’t exactly improve the agency’s efficiency.
Trump filled one of the vacancies with James Murphy, a Republican staffer at the NLRB for nearly half a century before he retired in December 2021. Murphy is now NLRB chair, and, like Carey, he gave off a mild whiff or resistance at Thursday’s hearing.
When pressed by Rep. Summer Lee, Democrat of Pennsylvania, about whether the NLRB “must remain an independent agency” (i.e., not one subject to White House control), Murphy said: “As an operational matter, yes.” Lee further noted that an executive order on independent agencies that Trump issued last year required each of them to establish an office of White House liaison. Does NLRB have one? “Not that I’m aware of,” Murphy answered. Will he oppose establishing a White House liaison at the NLRB? If the president presses the matter, Murphy said, “I’m not sure what position I would be in to oppose that, other than to resign.”
Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina, is probably the most anti-labor member of the full House Education and the Workforce Committee, of which she was previously chair. She tried to get Murphy to agree that the case backlog was the fault of the Biden NLRB devoting too much of its energies to overturning precedents (which she called “ideological agenda setting”) and not enough to processing more routine “retail” cases. Murphy conceded that overturning cases took time and therefore diverted staff resources, which were already thin due to budget cuts. But “having said that,” Murphy said, “I want to emphasize that the massive case backlog currently pending at the board when I arrived was far more attributable, I think, to the loss of quorum, than to any other issue.”
Translation: This is Trump’s mess.
Murphy also got asked (by Education and the Workforce ranking member Bobby Scott of Virginia): “Is the mission still at the NLRB to encourage the practice and procedure of collective bargaining?” This was a reference to the preamble to the National Labor Relations Act. The precise statutory language is: “It is declared to be the policy of the United States to … eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining (italics mine).”
Republicans like to pretend this pro-labor language doesn’t exist, and to say instead that the NLRB should neither promote nor oppose collective bargaining (though of course they like it fine when it opposes). But Murphy gave the right answer to Scott’s question. “Absolutely,” he said of the NLRB’s mission to encourage collective bargaining. “It’s statutorily required.”
Toward the end of the hearing Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, Democrat of California and ranking member of the subcommittee, told Carey and Murphy: “This has been a breath of fresh air. Forgive us, on our side, if we’re a little bit suspicious.”
Militant servility to Trump and MAGA has reached such epidemic levels among Trump administration officials that Democrats are perhaps overly grateful to find any who talk like a normal human being. We haven’t seen Trump’s NLRB overturn any Biden precedents yet; Murphy affirmed at the hearing that, following NLRB tradition, he won’t do so with fewer than three votes. That can’t happen until Republican nominee James Macy is confirmed, bringing the board’s composition up to three Republicans and one Democrat.
But Macy’s Senate confirmation hearing is scheduled for next week. Friends of labor will likely find their affection for Carey and Murphy dwindle rapidly after that.
