The NLRB Called Its Own Understaffing a Crisis. Congress Answered With a Cut.

The National Labor Relations Board is the agency that decides whether you were illegally fired for trying to unionize, or whether your employer has to bargain with the union you voted for.▸ It runs on caseworkers in regional offices who investigate charges one at a time. In its own FY2025 budget request, filed in March 2024, the agency asked Congress for 50 more of them, under a line item it titled, without qualification, "Address Regional Offices Staffing Crisis." Congress didn't fund the increase. The agency's own FY2026 budget request now proposes cutting the caseworker count instead.

The agency's budget sat flat at $299.2 million for two straight years — FY2024 actual and FY2025 enacted are identical to the dollar, per the NLRB's FY2026 Congressional Budget Justification.▸ For FY2026, the agency's own request proposes $285.2 million — a $14.0 million, 4.7% cut — which it says will be absorbed entirely by "reducing staffing," a program line explicitly labeled -99 FTE across the agency. That reversal is the whole story in one number: a year earlier, the agency had asked for 50 more positions specifically to relieve what it called, in writing, a regional staffing crisis. The FY2026 request doesn't restore that shortfall. It deepens it.

Casehandling is the NLRB's core function — the Office of the General Counsel and the Regional Offices that investigate unfair labor practice charges and run union representation elections.▸ That staff grew from 853 positions in FY2024 to an enacted 900 in FY2025. The FY2026 request cuts it to 839: a loss of 61 positions, or 6.8%, in a single year, per the same budget justification.

What that looks like on the ground is on the record in the agency's own internal guidance.▸ A 43-day government shutdown in the fall of 2025 drove a surge of new filings into regional offices that were already short-handed. On December 23, 2025, Acting General Counsel William B. Cowen issued GC Memo 26-01, telling regional staff that "the large influx of cases filed during the 43-day Government shutdown further exacerbated the existing backlog of cases and decreasing staffing levels." The memo's fix: new charges are no longer assigned to an investigator on filing. Workers who file a charge now have two weeks to submit their own timeline, documents, and witness list, or the charge can be dismissed for "lack of cooperation" — and even once that evidence is in, the case sits on an "unassigned case list until there is a Board Agent with capacity" to take it.

The backlog wasn't only a staffing problem — it was also a governance one.▸ The Board itself lost its voting quorum after President Trump removed Member Gwynne Wilcox in January 2025, a firing the Supreme Court allowed to stand while litigation continued, per its May 22, 2025 stay. The Board didn't function with a full quorum again until James Murphy and Scott Mayer were sworn in on January 7, 2026. Cases that piled up in the interim needed a fix of their own: in 2026 the agency's General Counsel launched a case reallocation initiative that bulk-transferred roughly 3,500 unfair labor practice cases — everything still pending in Regional Offices from before January 7, 2026 — out of eleven of the NLRB's busiest regions and into others with more capacity, simply to spread the backlog around the country rather than clear it.

Budget and staffing figures are drawn from the NLRB's own Congressional Budget Justification documents for FY2025 and FY2026, which report different vintages of the same fiscal years (e.g., FY2024 appears as an "annualized CR rate" in one document and as "actual" in the other) because each document reflects the best information available at its own time of publication; this piece uses the FY2026 document's figures throughout for internal consistency.