The strike-prevention agency budgeted itself out of existence

Congress created the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service in 1947, under the Taft-Hartley amendments to labor law, and gave it one job: help unions and employers settle contract fights before they become strikes, lockouts, or the kind of work stoppage that shuts down a hospital, a freight line, or a city bus system.▸ On March 14, 2025, the White House ordered FMCS eliminated — Section 2 of the executive order "Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy" named FMCS among seven small agencies whose "non-statutory components and functions" were to be cut "to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law." Thirteen months later, FMCS's own FY2027 budget submission asks Congress for $7,400,000 — not to run the agency, but, in the appropriation language itself, "for expenses necessary to carry out the closure of" it.

The cut was fast.▸ By April 2025, a lawsuit unions filed against the shutdown stated that DOGE and the Office of Management and Budget had reduced FMCS to five mediators and about eight support staff nationwide — instead of the 80 to 100 mediators FMCS itself had determined were necessary to cover the country, per Government Executive, which reported the filing. A month later, blocking the shutdown in State of Rhode Island v. Trump, U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell Jr. put it in the court's own words: "only 15 employees remain to do the work of more than 200," and FMCS "has ceased its grievance mediation services" outright, per the case record.

FMCS's own budget filing shows where that left headcount by fiscal year-end.

That FY2027 figure of 18 isn't a staffing plan for doing mediation work.▸ The document's own footnote says it "represents the maximum FTE necessary to conduct an orderly cessation of operations" — a headcount sized to close the agency, not to run it.

FMCS didn't just lose staff — it narrowed who gets to use it.▸ Its own budget document states: "Starting in April 2025, FMCS limited its involvement to facilities that provide health care services with bargaining units of 250 or more members, and to bargaining units of 1,000 members or more for all other industries in which it has jurisdiction," per the FY2027 Congressional Budget Submission. Most union contracts in the country cover far fewer workers than that, so the effect of the policy was to make most bargaining units categorically ineligible for federal mediation, regardless of staffing.

The caseload shows it.▸ Collective-bargaining "mediated cases" — negotiations where an FMCS mediator actually became active — held in the 2,300-to-2,900 range every year from FY2021 through FY2024, then fell to 684 in FY2025, a 70% drop, per Appendix A of the same document. Grievance mediation, a smaller program for disputes under existing contracts, fell even harder: assigned cases dropped from 1,460 in FY2024 to 383 in FY2025.

On December 30, 2025, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian, in American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO v. Goldstein, vacated the 250/1,000-member policy — finding the government offered "no explanation whatsoever" for the thresholds — and ordered FMCS to reverse the reduction in force that the policy had been used to justify, per the case record.

Before the cuts landed mid-year, FY2025 was still a close-to-normal budget year on paper: $53,705,000 appropriated.▸ Personnel — compensation and benefits combined — took roughly two-thirds of it. A tenth of it, $10,053,000, went unspent entirely; FMCS's own budget table flags that line "Reserved in FY due to pending litigation" — money held back because the agency it belonged to was, at that moment, being sued over whether it could legally spend it.

Two courts, in two suits, reached the same conclusion about the shutdown itself.▸ On November 21, 2025, the District of Rhode Island granted summary judgment for the plaintiff states, ruling the shutdown of FMCS (along with two other targeted agencies) "arbitrary and capricious" because the government "failed to offer a legitimate explanation" for dismantling agencies Congress funded and directed by statute, per the case record. Five weeks later came the Subramanian ruling ordering the reduction in force reversed outright. The government appealed that second ruling on February 27, 2026 — then withdrew the appeal on March 30, 2026, leaving the order to reverse the RIF standing, unchallenged, on the books.

Four days after that withdrawal, on April 3, 2026, FMCS submitted the FY2027 budget analyzed throughout this piece.▸ It did not propose restoring the agency a federal judge had just ordered restored. It proposed funding its shutdown: appropriated dollars falling from $53.7 million in FY2025 to $48.7 million enacted for FY2026 to a $7.4 million request for FY2027 — explicitly, in the appropriation language, to "carry out the closure" of the agency.

The Rhode Island ruling remains under appeal — the government's appeal (No. 26-1070) was docketed at the First Circuit on January 21, 2026, and briefing was still underway as of late May 2026.▸ Until that appeal resolves, or Congress funds FMCS at a level that lets it do the job the law assigns it, the agency that exists to keep contract disputes from becoming strikes is the one part of the federal labor-relations machinery that two courts have already found was shut down without a legitimate reason — and whose own budget office is still asking to finish the job.

Staffing, appropriations, and caseload figures are FMCS's own, from its FY2027 Congressional Budget Submission (April 3, 2026); FY2025 figures in that document are actuals, FY2026 is the enacted level, and FY2027 is a request Congress has not yet acted on. Court figures and quotations are drawn from the docketed record in the two cases cited below.