A Whiff of Rebellion From Trump’s Labor Board

It’s very subtle, and it probably won’t last. But it’s another dose of pushback for a president who’s lately getting a lot of it.

Even Crystal S. Carey, Republican general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, the federal agency that adjudicates labor-management disputes, thinks President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are screwing up her agency.

Carey, who before Trump appointed her general counsel was a partner at the union-busting law firm Morgan Lewis, didn’t put it exactly that way. In her prepared testimony Thursday before the Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions subcommittee of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, Carey took care to explain that the NLRB’s enormous case backlog rose to “unprecedented levels” under President Joe Biden. But that’s because congressional Republicans have been starving the NLRB of funds for 15 years, even as filings with the NLRB rise rapidly as American workers awaken to the fact that they possess labor rights. 

Trump asked Congress for only $285 million to fund the NLRB next year, down from $302 million when Trump entered office. Carey protested the NLRB’s underfunding but blamed it on neither Trump nor congressional Republicans. She did, however, say that she’d just learned the House Republican appropriations bill lowered Trump’s $285 million budget request by nearly one-third, to $200 million. That, Carey said, is “far below what we will need.”

Under Trump, NLRB staffing has fallen to 1,151. As I noted earlier this week, there are graduating high school classes bigger than that. (“My high school graduating class was bigger than that!” Arnie Arnesen told me when I appeared Wednesday on her podcast.) In her prepared statement, Carey said:

We continue to receive new charges every day, at record pace, all while we are 31 percent understaffed compared to 10 years ago when we experienced similar case intake. We are excited to have hiring authority to onboard nearly 100 new employes to the field this fiscal year. However, that number does not approach the number of employees we need to build........

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