President Donald Trump has removed a Democratic member of the U.S. National Labor Relations Board from office, an unprecedented move that will escalate an ongoing legal battle over the scope of the president's powers to control federal agencies.
Gwynne Wilcox, who was appointed to the board by Democratic former President Joe Biden, in a statement called her firing late Monday illegal and said she would pursue "all legal avenues" to challenge it.
The five-member board already had two vacancies, so the removal of Wilcox leaves the agency without a quorum to issue decisions even in routine cases accusing companies or unions of violating federal labor law.
Hundreds of cases are pending before the board, including ones involving Amazon.com, Tesla, Walmart, Apple, and dozens against Starbucks as it faces a nationwide union campaign.
The NLRB enforces workers' rights to organize, advocate for better working conditions, and join or dissolve unions. Federal labor law does not allow workers to sue for violations in court, so the board is often their only recourse.
Once board members are confirmed, federal law allows them to be removed only for "neglect of duty or malfeasance in office." About two dozen companies, including Amazon and Elon Musk's SpaceX, have filed lawsuits since last year challenging those protections and other aspects of the NLRB's structure.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment. It was not immediately clear whether Trump, a Republican, gave a reason for terminating Wilcox.
Trump late Monday also fired the NLRB's general counsel, Biden appointee Jennifer Abruzzo, who acts like a prosecutor and plays a key role in shaping board policy. That move was expected after courts upheld Biden's 2021 termination of Peter Robb, a labor lawyer appointed to the role by Trump.
Together, the firings signal a sharp turn away from the policies and legal theories embraced by the board under Biden that riled business groups and were widely seen as favoring unions.
Abruzzo's office had convinced Wilcox and other board members to create a new path for unions to represent workers, to ban mandatory meetings to discourage unionizing, and to expand the type of worker conduct protected by federal labor law.
Abruzzo has also been critical of the companies that have filed lawsuits claiming the NLRB's in-house enforcement proceedings are unconstitutional, accusing them of pushing meritless legal theories to distract from their violations of workers' rights.
The NLRB, which was created in 1935, is designed to be independent from the White House. But the companies suing the agency say that because board members create new policies by issuing decisions, the U.S. Constitution requires that they be directly accountable to the president.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the NLRB's structure decades ago, but the court's current conservative majority has shown a willingness to reverse longstanding legal precedent and has been skeptical of the broad powers granted to some federal agencies.
On Tuesday, Abruzzo in a statement said the labor board's efforts to empower workers in recent years would have a lasting impact.
"So, if the Agency does not fully effectuate its congressional mandate in the future as we did during my tenure, I expect that workers with assistance from their advocates will take matters into their own hands," she said.
