Labor Board Regions Struggle With Understaffing as Cases Pile Up

Just two of the National Labor Relations Board’s 26 regional offices have sufficient staffing to handle their workloads of cases alleging violations of labor law and petitioning for union elections.

The NLRB field operations overall are understaffed by 23%, with about 510 employees trying to manage a caseload that demands roughly 670 workers, according to recent agency personnel information reviewed by Bloomberg Law.

“The detrimental impacts on workers, their families, and communities because the agency is not sufficiently funded and staffed cannot be overstated,” said Jennifer Abruzzo, who led the regional offices as NLRB general counsel during the Biden administration.

The NLRB needs another $100 million in funding to robustly enforce federal labor law, said Abruzzo, now a senior adviser with the Communications Workers of America and of counsel with Bush Gottlieb. Instead, Congress’ latest appropriations package cut its budget by $5 million.

The NLRB has struggled for years with resource and personnel shortages before the second Trump administration ushered in a year of heavy attrition. The agency avoided the mass layoffs seen elsewhere in the federal government during 2025, but offers of voluntary early retirement and deferred resignations amid a hiring freeze led to an exodus of talent and experience.

The most recent publicly available data showed the entire NLRB workforce at approximately 1,250 employees, but staffing has declined in the eight months since that information was published.

Understaffing has created large backlogs as workload exceeds capacity, with new cases piling up on the many that remain unresolved years after they were first filed. The agency changed its docketing protocol in response to the backlog.

Beyond delaying case resolution and feeding the backlog, staffing shortfalls make investigations less efficient and effective, create administrative bottlenecks, cause evidence to grow stale, and threaten to spark burnout that could drive away more employees, according to interviews with 12 agency employees speaking on the condition of anonymity.

An understaffed and overworked NLRB is bad for employers, said Steven Suflas, an attorney at Holland & Hart LLP who represents companies. Suflas said he has cases that have been open for months and the agency hasn’t reached out.

“The longer a case lingers, the more uncertainty there is,” he said. “Clients want some certainty. They don’t like not knowing what’s going on.”

The NLRB declined to comment. General Counsel Crystal Carey said in a Jan. 28 memo that addressing the case backlog is her priority. Member James Murphy told lawmakers in October that resolving the backlog is his “primary objective” and the deciding factor in why he came out of retirement.

Nationwide Footprint

While understaffing and case backlogs have negatively affected NLRB operations in its Washington headquarters, the impact has been most severe in the field, agency employees said.

The lion’s share of the NLRB’s work happens in the regions, which cover geographic areas of varying sizes. The Atlanta region, for example, handles cases from eight states, whereas the Cleveland region covers just Ohio.

Regional offices investigate charges of labor law violations, issue complaints when the allegations have merit, negotiate settlements, take cases to trial before administrative law judges, and draft briefs for cases appealed to the board.

They also process union representation petitions, administer elections, count ballots, and certify results.

Representation cases and ALJ trials come with hard deadlines, meaning that the ULP charges—mainly filed by unions and individual workers—get pushed further back in the queue.

The understaffing in the field isn’t evenly distributed. The regional offices headquartered in Chicago, Philadelphia, Buffalo, and Tampa are in the worst shape, with less than 70% of the personnel needed for their workloads. Brooklyn and Pittsburgh are the only regions with sufficient staffing.

But even board agents located in regions with healthier staffing can have high caseloads, as some undermanned offices send cases to those with more bandwidth, an agency employee said.

The NLRB calculates staffing needs by allotting one attorney or field examiner per 45 cases of rolling average intake, plus an additional agent for compliance. The agency also estimates one supervisor per five agents, as well as a set number of managers for each region.

Negative Consequences

Case backlogs and inadequate personnel create a host of problems, field staffers said.

Investigations that start late, get reassigned from a departed employee’s docket, or suffer from other delays have led to discovering evidence of previously unalleged violations after the time limit has expired for parties to charge them, they said.

Delays can make it more difficult to locate witnesses, especially in workplaces with high turnover, board agents said. Memories fade, weakening witness recall when questioned during investigations or at trial.

Resuming activity on an idle case requires rereading files to catch up on details, which is work that wouldn’t be necessary if caseloads weren’t so high, field staffers said.

Supervisors are also understaffed and overburdened, sparking case delay when key actions like dismissals or settlements have to wait for their approval, regional employees said.

The current situation in the regions can be demoralizing, especially for a workforce that believes strongly in the agency’s mission, they said.

Field staff are responsible for communicating with parties who file unfair labor practice charges, including people who verbally lash out when told there’s been no progress on their cases.

Hurdles at HQ

NLRB attorneys at the agency’s headquarters have different roles than their colleagues in the field. But they described many of the same obstacles stemming from too much work and not enough personnel, like decisional bottlenecks and disheartening delays.

Headquarters houses divisions of the general counsel’s office that focus on priorities like providing advice to regional offices and litigating in federal court. Some litigation options have been taken off the table due to staffing shortages, an agency attorney said.

The agency’s Washington office is also where board-side employees are located, including the board members’ staff, representation appeals unit, solicitor’s office, and executive secretary’s division.

In addition to staffing shortages, board-side case backlogs were driven by the NLRB lacking enough members to issue decisions for nearly a year.

NLRB personnel said that their managers have been reasonable about how much work can be finished in light of the short staff. None of the employees interviewed said supervisors had pressured them to work off the clock.

Several field staffers said the agency’s recent changes to the docketing system that shunts new cases to an unassigned list if no board agents are available have helped alleviate some pressure. But others emphasized that cases are still stacking and that reinforcements are needed.