On January 27th 2025, a mere week after being sworn into his second term, Donald Trump took the unprecedented step of firing Gwynne Wilcox, the chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), not for neglect of duty or for malfeasance, but for "disfavoring the interests of employers.” Trump’s explanation tells us all that we need to know. The single goal of his administration is to serve the interests of employers and the capitalist class in their inexorable pursuit of profits.
The NLRB was founded in 1935 after decades of grassroots struggle, establishing a government body to mediate disputes between labor and capital. It is far from perfect. Still, it is nearly the sole institutional obstacle to the rapacious extraction of surplus value from labor. Without conscious political intervention by the labor movement, independent of the liberal bourgeois Democratic Party it has tied itself to since it first won the creation of the NLRB, these meager yet hard-fought gains will be entirely dismantled by labor’s class enemies.
This article details the Trump administration’s attempt to hollow out and ultimately destroy the NLRB. The last 20 months have demonstrated the need for socialists to lead the labor movement in defending our ability to protect workers’ rights and expanding those protections inside and outside the Board. The Democrats’ feeble resistance to Trump’s Republican Party, and their firm defense of the duopoly that enables it, clearly demonstrate our need for independent power.
Presidential Power
The NLRB had three sitting members upon Trump’s election to office. Gwynne Wilcox was a former labor-side labor lawyer, Biden appointee, and the first Black woman to hold a seat on the Board. Marvin Kaplan, former general counsel to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), was a first-term Trump appointee. Finally, David Prouty, a Biden appointee, had served as general counsel to unions like SEIU, UNITE HERE, and the MLBPA, and had also been a former staff researcher and organizer for AFSCME. After firing Wilcox, Trump reappointed Kaplan, who had previously served in the role during Trump’s first term, as chair.
Historically, the NLRB has had five members—a three-member majority representing the governing party and two members representing the opposition. Three Board members constitute a quorum, without which it cannot conduct regular business. Wilcox’s exit left the Board unable to meet quorum for the first time since 2014.
Wilcox immediately filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, claiming that her termination was illegal. A DC District Court judge sided with Wilcox, ordering her reinstatement as Board chair. But the lower court’s decision was immediately blocked by the Supreme Court, which upheld Wilcox's dismissal. By making this decision, the Supreme Court set a new precedent that the president can fire and replace Board members at will. This increased presidential authority diminishes the independence of the NLRB.
Trump’s Appointments
As Wilcox v. Trump wound its way through the courts, Kaplan exited the board after his term expired, leaving Prouty as the sole member. Trump then nominated James Murphy for Board chair, Scott Mayer for a Board seat, and Crystal Carey for general counsel to the Board. These nominations were confirmed by the Senate in December of 2025. The Senate voted to confirm these appointments alongside 100 other Trump nominees. The vote was carried along partisan lines, with the support of all 53 Senate Republicans, and the opposition of 41 Democrats and 2 independents.
Murphy had served in various roles at the Board since 1974, beginning as a clerk and working his way up to chief counsel to his predecessor Kaplan. Scott Mayer, also confirmed to the Board, previously worked as chief labor counsel to Boeing, and prior to that, as an attorney for the law firm Morgan Lewis (which we will return to later). These confirmations restored the NLRB to quorum, but left it without the three-seat majority necessary for the Republicans to unilaterally overturn previous policy.
To obtain this majority, Trump nominated longtime management-side labor attorney James Macy in April of 2026. He simultaneously nominated Prouty for another term. Both were confirmed in August, leaving only one (minority) seat vacant, opening the door to further devastation of labor protections under an NLRB with a solid Republican majority.
Despite Murphy’s insistence that the Board would uphold NLRB tradition and not overturn prior policy decisions “in the absence of a three-member majority,” rollbacks of Biden-era advancements were well underway. Former Chair Marvin Kaplan previously stated that with a three-person board, a 2-1 vote would suffice for rulemaking, citing a 2011 precedent. We are already seeing that, with a three-seat majority, the gloves will come off and the intensity of rollbacks and pro-capital decisions will increase.
Crystal Carey, the Board’s new counsel, previously served as a partner at Morgan Lewis, which is also a former employer of Board member Scott Mayer. Morgan Lewis is an elite law firm, representing dozens of the largest and most powerful companies in the world, including the Trump Organization from 2005 to 2021. Its ranks of partners have included such luminaries as Republican Senator Ted Cruz and former NLRB chair Philip Miscimarra, who was originally appointed to the Board by Obama before being promoted to chair by Trump in 2017. As chair, Miscimarra oversaw the reversal of several Obama-era precedents which strengthened the power of employers. While at Morgan Lewis, Carey represented Amazon on behalf of the firm. Now, as one of her first acts as the NLRB's general counsel, she negotiated a major settlement in Amazon's favor.
Class Warfare
With its quorum restored, the NLRB returned to business in December 2025. It quickly rescinded a 2023 rule for determining joint employer status, returning the rule to its 2020 Trump-era standard. Joint employment allows multiple businesses to share authority and legal obligations over a workforce. The Trump-era rule makes it harder for businesses to be joint employers, lessening their obligation to comply with labor regulations and bargain with union representatives.
Amazon uses independent direct service providers (DSPs) to deliver packages. In 2023, one such DSP, Battle Tested Strategies (BTS) out of Palmdale, California, recognized its drivers as part of Teamsters Local 396. This made BTS the first Amazon DSP with a unionized workforce. After the recognition, Amazon broke off its contract with BTS, leading the Teamsters to file an unfair labor practice charge against the company. A 2024 NLRB decision found Amazon to be a joint employer of the drivers and, as such, have an obligation to bargain with the union.
After the Board reversed the joint employer rule, Carey made an agreement with Amazon. The company would offer payouts in the amount of two weeks' wages to BTS’ drivers. In exchange, the Board would not recognize Amazon as a joint employer, absolving them of their duty to recognize and bargain with the organized workers at BTS.
Questioned by Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar about possible ethics concerns in this case, Carey stated that there was no conflict of interest, since her former employer Morgan Lewis did not represent Amazon in that negotiation. In any case, argued Carey, a sufficient length of time had passed between her prior representation of Amazon and her negotiations as Board counsel to be outside the bounds of the ethics rules of the NLRB. Meanwhile, Carey filed a motion in May to overturn the Board’s 2024 ruling that banned anti-union captive audience meetings. This decision was also borne out of a case involving Amazon. Amazon simultaneously appealed that decision at the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Amazon is currently challenging the NLRB’s very existence by appealing the election certification of the Amazon Labor Union following their victory at Amazon’s Staten Island facility. Amazon is arguing that the NLRB denied the company its Fifth Amendment due-process rights and its Sixth Amendment right to a trial by jury in its certification of the ALU. In this fight, Amazon is represented by—wait for it—Morgan Lewis.
Amazon argues that the NLRB as an institution is functionally unconstitutional, building off a 2025 case between the NLRB and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. In that case, the Fifth Circuit Court found the NLRB to be unconstitutional on multiple grounds, including lack of presidential control and denial of the jury-trial rights of employers. The court barred the Board from operating in its jurisdiction (Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi). This means that workers in these states have no recourse to a higher authority in labor struggles, leaving them at the mercy of their employers. Nationally, the Supreme Court may decide the NLRB’s fate. If they find the NLRB unconstitutional, it could mean the full disbanding of the Board.
Early this year, the NLRB also relinquished its jurisdiction over SpaceX, ceding its authority to the National Mediation Board (NMB), which handles labor disputes in the railroad and airline industries. In doing so, the NLRB dismissed ongoing unfair labor practice complaints against the company, including the case that was the basis for last year’s Fifth Circuit decision. This is a victory for SpaceX and Musk, who have long argued that space transportation falls under the NMB and not the NLRB.
The NLRB was one of the agencies audited by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Having official access between April-July 2025, Board personnel allege that DOGE unlawfully accessed NLRB systems as early as March, routing information out and even going so far as to intimidate and threaten Board IT staff who raised the alarm. Such unprecedented access would have given DOGE, and by extension Musk, access to reams of confidential information concerning union organizing efforts and ongoing Board investigations. Musk could use this information to sabotage labor organizing on a national scale. The Government Accountability Office has contested these claims, denying that DOGE accessed NLRB systems at all.
The Trump administration is also slashing funding for the NLRB, the Department of Labor, and OSHA. The proposed federal spending bill for fiscal year 2027 includes a $94 million reduction, almost a third of the Board’s current budget. GC Carey protested that the drastic budget reduction would seriously impair the Board’s ability to work through its backlog of almost 16,000 cases, a situation already exacerbated by layoffs.
DSA’s Alternative
Trump and Musk’s corrupt attacks on the NLRB represent an ever more flagrant escalation in the class war. But the Democrats will not save the NLRB. Over the last half century the Board has degenerated under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The Popular Front coalition that built the New Deal and established the NLRB is long gone, and the Democrats have long abandoned New Deal policies. Only one force can prevent labor’s further loss of power: the organized working class itself.
As labor continues to surge from below in the face of this onslaught from above, DSA must lead this force in a political direction. DSA must organize within and alongside the labor movement to defend the NLRB in the immediate term. In the longer term, it must fight to expand labor’s power to go beyond the scope of the Board itself.
A new, more democratic and dynamic NLRB would be freed from the control of a single individual in the form of the Presidency. Instead of an endless policy flip-flop between administrations in a gridlocked two-party system, workers could build on their gains, and not need to desperately fight to defend them. This can only be achieved in a system where capitalist interests are excised entirely. Freed from capital’s domination, a mediating body like the NLRB could become a site for direct deliberation between organized labor and the democratic socialist state in building a communist future.
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