NLRB Staff Exodus Hinders Board From Digging Out of Backlog (1)

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 Jennifer Abruzzo, who served as the agency’s general counsel during the Biden administration.

“The case backlog on the board side of the agency may actually grow right now, regardless of the quorum,” said Abruzzo, now a senior adviser with the Communications Workers of America and of counsel with Bush Gottlieb.

The significant departures in the field will also hurt the agency’s ability to effectively and efficiently process representation and unfair labor practice cases, she said.

Abruzzo added that she wouldn’t be surprised to see a significant increase in the number of ULP cases that regional offices dismiss or defer.

The NLRB didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Erasing Gains

The comings and goings in the NLRB’s internal newsletters don’t provide a comprehensive accounting of staff attrition during the Trump administration. The exits of Operations-Management Division chief Joan Sullivan and longtime board attorney Andrew Krafts, for example, either fell outside of the newsletters’ timeframe or otherwise weren’t included.

But the departures and welcomes show how the agency’s workforce has shrunk over the past year, in addition to naming more than 150 employees who left and the handful who arrived.

Four administrative law judges exited the agency: Gerald Etchingham; Jeffrey Wedekind; Christine Dibble; and Melissa Olivero.

Those departures put the NLRB back where it was before it used money from its fiscal year 2023 budget increase—the first and only funding bump it received since fiscal year 2014—to hire new ALJs, said McFerran.

Budget Constraints

The NLRB’s ability to replace employees is limited, as it’s on track to lose money in the next appropriations package.

Lawmakers from the House and Senate released a compromise appropriations bill Tuesday that would reduce the NLRB’s $299 million budget by $5 million.

That funding drop is in line with the Senate’s proposal, while the the House had called for a $100 million cut. The NLRB’s own request was $14 million under its current funding, in part from employee exits driving down its overall payroll.

“Certainly the resources are limited and create a challenge to be able to address important issues,” said Marvin Kaplan, former NLRB chair who’s now an attorney at Jackson Lewis PC. “The board would need to be very creative to absorb another reduction in the budget.”

Uneven Impact

The staff attrition has hit some parts of the agency harder than others.

The unit responsible for defending the agency against the slew of constitutional lawsuits it’s faced over the past few years lost at least six attorneys, including supervisory lawyers Christine Flack, Paul Augustus Thomas, and Helene Lerner Valenti. But at least one new attorney joined the team in 2025.

The NLRB’s Boston office saw the exit of its regional director, Laura Sacks, and at least five other staffers. The Hartford office, which is part of the same region, lost at least six employees, although two of those were student trainees.

Regional offices that lost four or more employees include Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle.

The agency’s staffing shortages show up in the leadership of its field offices. Thirteen of the NLRB’s 25 regions have at least one vacancy among the regional director, regional attorney, or assistant to the regional director positions, according to a Bloomberg Law review of agency data.

Fourteen of the 21 subregional or resident offices lack an official leader.

“Hopefully the new general counsel will take a comprehensive look at staffing, in consultation with the new board quorum,” said Roger King, senior labor and employment counsel for the employer group HR Policy Association.

“This is perhaps the time to do a strategic, long-range overview” that could include “consolidating certain regional offices,” he said.