The National Labor Relations Board has suffered grinding attrition during the Trump administration that will hamper its efforts to enforce labor law even as it regained the capacity to decide cases with two new members in place.
The NLRB said goodbye to more than 150 employees over the past year, while welcoming just eight new workers, according to internal agency newsletters reviewed by Bloomberg Law. That represents more than a 10% cut to its workforce.
“That is a lot of departures for an agency that was already understaffed,” said Lauren McFerran, a senior fellow at the New Century Foundation who led the NLRB during the Biden administration. “It represents the loss of a lot of institutional knowledge.”
The NLRB avoided the type of mass layoffs that the Trump administration executed at other agencies over the course of 2025. But it still saw an exodus of talent that wasn’t replaced due in part to workers taking voluntary early retirements and deferred resignations amid a hiring freeze.
The board’s inability to issue rulings for most of that year caused a substantial pileup of cases. The backlog reached 500 cases as of October, according to NLRB member James Murphy’s testimony at his nomination hearing.
But the loss of personnel, especially administrative law judges and senior board staffers, will prevent the newly reactivated NLRB from resolving cases in a timely fashion, including those that have festered over the past year and those that are pending litigation, said...
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