# NLRB The **National Labor Relations Board** administers private-sector labor law under the [[National Labor Relations Act]] of 1935: five members appointed to staggered five-year terms, a General Counsel with independent prosecutorial authority, and regional offices that run union-representation elections and investigate unfair-labor-practice charges against employers and unions. It has no power to fine; its remedies are reinstatement, back pay and orders, enforced through the courts of appeals. Its interpretations swing with its majority — joint-employer standards, captive-audience meetings, the definition of "employee" for gig workers — so that labor law in practice is whatever the current three votes say it is, which is why control of the Board is fought over as hard as the statute. ## The removal case On **January 27, 2025** the President fired Board member Gwynne Wilcox before her term ended and dismissed General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo — the first removal of an NLRB member in the agency's ninety years, and the first move in the campaign against for-cause removal protection that the vault tracks under [[Unitary Executive Theory]]. The firing left the Board with two members, below its three-member quorum, and unable to decide cases. Wilcox won reinstatement in district court; the Supreme Court stayed it on May 22, 2025, the D.C. Circuit held in December 2025 that Congress cannot bar the President from removing Board members at will, and *[[Trump v. Slaughter]]* (June 29, 2026) settled the question for every multi-member agency by overruling *[[Humphrey's Executor v. United States]]*. The NLRB was the test case and the Fed ([[Trump v. Cook]]) the one exception. ## Since The Board went nearly a year without a quorum — the longest in its history — until the Senate confirmed James Murphy and Scott Mayer, sworn in **January 7, 2026** along with the new General Counsel, Crystal Carey, giving a 2–1 Republican majority (Murphy, Mayer, Prouty) with two seats vacant; a fourth nominee was named in April 2026. The practical effect of the gap was the one the vault's "hollowed, not abolished" pattern predicts: elections went uncertified, charges went unadjudicated, and the Biden-era precedents the new majority means to reverse stayed on the books because there was no one to reverse them. The Board is now issuing decisions again, and the [[Independent Regulatory Commissions Hub]] page tracks it beside the FTC, the MSPB and the FLRA as the agencies whose independence ended in the same year. ## The SpaceX exit The removal-power argument reached the Board as a corporate litigation defense a year before the presidential firing. Charged in January 2024 with illegally firing eight engineers over an open letter criticizing Musk, [[SpaceX]] sued to have the NLRB's structure declared unconstitutional. On August 19, 2025 the Fifth Circuit held the ALJs' and Board members' removal protections likely unconstitutional and froze the case. The workers' claims then disappeared through a different door. On January 14, 2026 the [[National Mediation Board]] ruled SpaceX is covered by the [[Railway Labor Act]], and in February 2026 the NLRB dismissed its complaint for lack of jurisdiction. See [[SpaceX v. NLRB]]. Earlier, the full Fifth Circuit had ruled 9–8 (October 2024) that the Board could not order Musk to delete a 2018 anti-union tweet. See [[Musk Companies Labor Litigation]]. ## See Also - [[National Labor Relations Act]] · [[Independent Regulatory Commissions Hub]] · [[Unitary Executive Theory]] - [[Humphrey's Executor v. United States]] · [[Trump v. Slaughter]] · [[Trump v. Cook]] · [[Federal Labor Relations Authority]] · [[Merit Systems Protection Board]] - [[Federal Agencies]] - [[SpaceX v. NLRB]] · [[National Mediation Board]] · [[Railway Labor Act]] · [[Musk Companies Labor Litigation]]