Less than one month after President Donald Trump’s second inauguration I ventured the prediction that Trump’s anti-regulation strategy, which was to gum up operations at regulatory agencies in every conceivable way, was self-defeating. (See “Trump’s Incompetence Is Botching His Own Deregulation Spree.”) To deregulate, I explained, a regulatory agency must be functional. Eliminating a Biden-era regulation is a process: It requires an agency to propose a new regulation reversing the prior one; collect public comment on same; and follow various other time-consuming steps required under the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act. The same logic applied to eliminating Biden-era precedents at quasi-judicial independent agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, or the National Labor Relations Board. To achieve these goals, you need a quorum at such agencies. Firing board members and refusing to fill vacancies, which is Trump’s preferred method, deprives you of that quorum.
Disciplined deregulation requires the sort of patience and intelligence that, happily, is in short supply within the Trump administration. Even White House budget chief Russell “Project 2025” Vought can’t summon it.
What this means is that, although Trump has reversed a lot of executive orders, fired a lot of people, and cut off a lot of funding (often, in the latter two instances, in violation of the law), he hasn’t killed a lot of major regulations. I count five thus far, according to a regulatory tracker maintained by the Brookings Institution, of which only one—an Environmental Protection Agency rule rescinding an Obama-era regulatory finding that greenhouse-gas emissions pose a danger to the nation’s health and welfare—is cause for serious alarm. And whether even these five regulations were crafted with sufficient care to survive court challenges remains to be seen. During Trump’s first term they usually were not. In a 2021 law review articletitled “Tired of Winning,” Bethany A. Davis Noll, litigation director of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity, reported that where previous administrations had won 70 percent of all regulatory court challenges, the Trump administration won a mere 23 percent.
I can’t find a comparable tracker for quasi-judicial rulings at independent agencies, but the business lobby lost a couple of big ones this month at the NLRB. Both cases were about union-busting at Amazon, whose chairman, Jeff Bezos, kisses Trump’s ass so relentlessly that even Trump finds it a bit much. These NLRB rulings might have gone in Amazon’s favor had Trump not fired NLRB Chair Gwynne Wilcox (in violation of a 1935 Supreme Court ruling that the current high court is expected any day now to overturn) and then delayed giving the NLRB a quorum until this past December.
The first NLRB ruling, on June 15, rejected Amazon’s request to overturn an organizing victory by the United Food & Commercial Workers at a Whole Foods market in Philadelphia. Employees at the grocery voted to unionize in January 2025, and the NLRB certified the victory four months later. It was the first successful union drive in the 46-year history of Whole Foods. Amazon is hopping mad, and it filed no fewer than seven complaints to the NLRB about it, starting before the union election even took place. Amazon’s principal argument is that management was not permitted to compel Whole Foods employees to attend gatherings at which the company discouraged unionization because a Biden-era ruling (also involving Amazon) forbade such “captive meetings.” That decision, Amazon said, “imposed a flagrantly unconstitutional set of handcuffs on [Whole Foods management] in violation of the First Amendment.”
The board didn’t elaborate on why it rejected Amazon’s First Amendment argument, but one likely reason was that the board felt it lacked sufficient Republican members to overturn a Biden precedent. The NLRB did finally acquire a quorum in December, along with a Republican majority, with two Republicans and one Democrat. But the board has declined to overturn any precedents with fewer than three votes, and that would require one more Republican member. This is longstanding practice at the NLRB, not required by any law or regulation. It’s the kind of genteel tradition that one would expect a Trump appointee to flush down the toilet. But the current NLRB chair, James Murphy, worked as a staff aide at the NLRB more than 40 years, and the tradition matters to him; he recommitted to honoring it earlier this month at a House hearing.
It was Amazon’s hard luck that its case came before the board before the Senate got around to confirming Trump’s nominee to fill a vacant Republican slot on the board, James Macy. For his part, Trump didn’t get around to nominating Macy until this past April, even though the slot had been open since August 2025. Macy’s nomination is expected to get a Senate vote today.
The second NLRB ruling against Amazon’s union-busting, handed down by a regional administrative law judge rather than by the Washington-based board, occurred earlier this week. The case was about Amazon’s refusal to bargain over a union contract with warehouse workers in San Francisco who voted, way back in October 2024, to affiliate with the Teamsters. This refusal violates a Biden-era ruling by the full board that said after a successful “card check” (in which a majority of workers sign union authorization cards) management must immediately start negotiating a contract or request a more formal NLRB-supervised union election. Amazon did neither. Once again, Amazon asked the NLRB judge to reverse a Biden precedent, arguing in this instance that it was at odds with a Supreme Court precedent. Amazon lawyers had to know that the administrative law judge, or ALJ, lacked any power to overturn NLRB precedent, so it can hardly be surprised that it lost.
Amazon’s intended audience was never the ALJ, but rather the Washington-based board, or, failing that, an appellate judge. It seems likely that the Republican board will be willing to overturn the offending precedent if Macy is confirmed. I doubt the Democrats will try to postpone or kill Macy’s nomination, but that would be one way to prevent Amazon from winning this one. Too bad it isn’t up to the House, which has already demonstrated its willingness to compel management to negotiate union contracts. The pro-union Republican virus, alas, has not crossed over to the Senate side.
