Donald Trump doubled his advantage among working-class voters between 2016 and 2024, going from a seven-point edge to a 14-point margin. This happened during the same span in which his first-term appointees at the National Labor Relations Board systematically dismantled worker protections, scuttled challenges holding McDonald’s liable for franchise labor violations, permitted employers to force workers to surrender their right to sue, and denied employees the right to use work email for workplace organizing.
The riddle isn’t just that Trump expanded his share of the working-class vote. It’s that he did it while actively wrecking the machinery designed to protect those voters from their employers.
Now he’s doing it again, and the NLRB strategy this time is even more direct: deny the agency a functioning board, let the cases pile up, and make sure no one can appeal an adverse decision. Trump fired NLRB Board Chair Gwynn Wilcox days after his second inauguration without stated cause, a move plainly illegal under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. Wilcox sued. A district court reinstated her. The D.C. Court of Appeals stayed that reinstatement on emergency grounds—the emergency apparently being that the NLRB might resume functioning. The appeals court reversed itself and reinstated Wilcox again. Then the Supreme Court blocked her reinstatement on the grounds that it intends to overturn the 1935 precedent protecting her position but just hasn’t gotten around to it yet.
The quorum freeze and the case backlog
Without Wilcox, the NLRB lacked a quorum for most of 2025. That left regional administrative law judges operating under Biden-era precedents, many of which had overturned Trump’s first-term rulings favoring management. It also left thousands of unfair labor practice cases stuck in limbo, unable to appeal to the full board in Washington. Management’s second-favorite destination for labor complaints is limbo. The favorite is dismissal.
Trump restored a three-person quorum in December by nominating two Republicans, James Murphy and Scott Mayer, who joined the sole remaining board member, Democrat David Prouty. That gave the NLRB a Republican majority and the ability to resume operations. The new board has honored a genteel NLRB tradition not to overturn major precedents with fewer than three votes. Once Trump nominee James Macy is confirmed alongside Prouty’s renomination, that tradition ends and the dismantling of Biden-era worker protections resumes in earnest.
In the meantime, the NLRB is dealing with a staggering case backlog. The agency’s budget has fallen from $408 million in 2011 to $294 million today, adjusted for inflation. Staffing dropped from 1,733 employees in 2011 to 1,151 now. There are high school graduating classes bigger than that. As of March, 10,000 cases had been pending review for more than six months.
The efficiency that isn’t
The NLRB’s solution to the backlog was to transfer 3,500 cases to less-burdened regional offices. But as Democratic Representatives Bobby Scott and Mark DeSaulnier pointed out in a letter to NLRB General Counsel Crystal Carey, the plan doesn’t reduce workload. It doubles it.
Regional staff transfer a case, notify the parties, and if the new office finds merit, the case returns to the original region for in-person proceedings before an administrative law judge. Staff in the originating region then have to relearn the facts to argue the case, duplicating the work already done.
The inefficiency is the point. The NLRB isn’t trying to process cases faster. It’s trying to dismiss them faster. Shifting a case between regions makes on-site visits and in-person interviews unlikely. The less regional employees know about a claim, the easier it is to let it go.
Union elections are down 30 percent in Trump’s first year back in office, according to the Center for American Progress. In 2023, a union’s likelihood of winning an NLRB-supervised election was 72 percent. Now it’s 70 percent. Staff shortages explain some of the decline, but the drop is too steep for that alone. Union organizers know the NLRB is less inclined to certify their efforts, so they’re not bothering to file.
The Supreme Court wildcard
The long-term threat to the NLRB isn’t just Trump’s appointments or budget cuts. It’s the Supreme Court’s plan to dismantle the legal precedent that protects independent agency board members from at-will presidential firing. The vehicle for that dismantling won’t be Wilcox’s case, to which the Court denied cert, but Trump v. Slaughter, involving Trump’s firing of Democratic Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter. The Court heard arguments in December and has yet to issue a decision.
The delay is telling. The reactionary majority needs to craft a rationale that eliminates job protections for agencies like the NLRB and FTC while preserving them for the Federal Reserve, the one independent agency the Court takes seriously enough not to let Trump wreck. If Trump destabilizes the Fed, it affects their retirement accounts. You can’t say that in a legal opinion, so the justices are working on something that sounds better.
The working-class voters who delivered Trump his expanded margin in 2024 are now watching the dismantling of the one federal agency with the mandate to protect them from employer retaliation, wage theft, and union-busting. The question isn’t whether Trump is wrecking the NLRB. He is, systematically and on the record. The question is whether the voters who put him there will notice before the damage becomes permanent.
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