JON ELSWICK/AP PHOTO
This article appears in the June 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
If President Trump’s appointees had ever been guests on the 1950s TV show What’s My Line?, they would have stumped the show’s celebrity panelists, who would ask those guests questions to figure out what they did for a living. Who, learning some details of Pete Hegseth’s life, would have ventured so deranged a guess that his day job was secretary of defense? Or that Tulsi Gabbard was director of national intelligence?
Trump chose some of his appointees, of course, specifically to undo the work or even the mission of the departments and agencies they were to lead. This list includes RFK Jr. at Health and Human Services, Pam Bondi at Justice, and Kash Patel at the FBI. Trump put Linda McMahon atop the Department of Education, which he had pledged to abolish, and McMahon quickly laid off nearly half of the department’s staff.
But it’s the agency that most directly concerns the rights of American workers where Trump had made perhaps his most fox-in-the-henhouse appointment. To be the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, Trump has nominated attorney Crystal Carey, a labor relations specialist at the firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, which represents employers against their workers in union elections, bargaining, and some grievance proceedings, and in legal actions against the government. Republican administrations, particularly since Ronald Reagan’s, have invariably appointed pro-employer attorneys to run the NLRB, the agency that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal established to ensure workers’ rights to unionize and compel compliance with labor law. But Carey’s appointment—which has yet to be confirmed by the Senate—raises that counter-purposeful practice to a whole new level.
Early last year, upset that the NLRB had found one of his companies (SpaceX) to be in violation of the National Labor Relations Act for having fired eight workers who’d sent management a letter criticizing him, owner Elon Musk reached out to Morgan Lewis to retaliate. Musk, who once flatly declared at a New York Times conference that “I disagree with the idea of unions,” found fellow disagree-ers at Morgan Lewis. One month later, the firm filed a suit on SpaceX’s behalf arguing that the NLRB was unconstitutional. (In the year since SpaceX and Morgan Lewis first challenged the agency’s constitutionality, a host of other union-hating corporations, including Amazon and Trader Joe’s, are also arguing that the Board is unconstitutional.)
Roughly 20 percent of DOL staff had retired or taken the administration’s buyout offer by early May.
Morgan Lewis contended that by setting up its own dispute resolution infrastructure, in which its administrative judges ruled on cases that companies, workers, and the agency brought before it, the NLRB violated the Constitution’s separation of powers between the executive and judicial branches—despite the fact that any NLRB ruling can be appealed to federal courts. But in establishing the NLRB in 1935, Congress had decided that labor law specialists should have first crack at the myriad cases that would arise—just as they had previously decided that they’d entrust the securities law specialists at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the trade, retail, wholesale, and market-concentration law specialists at the Federal Trade Commission to make rulings of their own, which also then could be appealed to the federal bench. By so doing, they not only vested power in the administrative judges best versed in the often highly technical case law, but also kept the federal courts from being swamped. In 1937, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the NLRB, as it had previously upheld the constitutionality of the FTC and the SEC.
Today, however, Trump has nominated an attorney from the lead firm that is arguing the NLRB is unconstitutional to be the NLRB’s general counsel, in which position she’d presumably be responsible for opposing that argument in court. While Carey herself has stated no position on this question—though I’m certain that the Democrats on the Senate committee that will vet her will ask her about that during her confirmation hearing—she has co-authored articles with her fellow Morgan Lewis partners, labor law specialists all, that argue against not merely the pro-worker rulings of Board during the Biden presidency, but also against the Board’s fundamental powers. In light of the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Loper Bright, which stuck a blow at the power of regulatory agencies, she and her colleagues wrote that the NLRB has routinely exceeded its authority, particularly during Democratic administrations, by its interpretations of labor law. (Every such interpretation their article referenced was an instance in which the Board had ruled in favor of workers.) That authority, they argued, should have belonged to the courts—historically the branch of government most hostile to worker rights (though they did not say this, of course).
For decades, Carey and partners wrote, “the Supreme Court gave deference to the NLRB’s legal positions and did not independently decide the best meaning of the statute. But Loper Bright should eliminate the basis upon which the prior decisions rested …”
Eliminate the basis upon which prior decisions rested? Does that mean that Carey would be fine with tossing every NLRB ruling since its inception? While her article does not contend that the Board is unconstitutional per se, its contentions would have much the same effect as those in the SpaceX suit were it to prevail: stripping the NLRB of its authority to rule on most labor disputes—perhaps (worse yet) even retroactively—and transferring that authority to the courts.
The NLRB has yet to see the kind of mass flight or firing of staff that many federal agencies and departments have seen since Trump, Musk, and DOGE blew into town. In part, this is surely because Carey, as I write, has yet to be confirmed, and Trump has been slow to nominate new members to the Board. “Most of 30-some-odd members of the career staff who have left,” says Jennifer Abruzzo, who was the Board’s general counsel during Biden’s presidency, “had already determined to retire this year,” before Trump came to power. In the face of steadily shrinking budgets, however, the NLRB had already been losing career staff for many years. “Ten years ago, the board had 1,400 field staffers,” says Abruzzo (who’d worked at the board for a quarter-century), investigating allegations of unfair labor practices and running representation elections. “Now, there are just 700.” Except for the first two years of the Biden presidency, when the Democrats also controlled Congress, the Board was “flat-funded” for many years, says Abruzzo, being appropriated the same amount of funding every year even as inflation ate away at the value of that money. Even before Trump’s return, that has had real consequences for the Board’s ability to do its work.
“We’ve gone from 20 cases a year to 80 cases a year,” says one field investigator in the New York region. “It used to take two to three weeks to complete an investigation; now [dealing with so many cases simultaneously] it takes two to three months.”
Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Trump’s labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, was touted as pro-labor but has been nearly invisible since her confirmation.
WHILE NO ONE AS YET IS CONTESTING the constitutionality of the Department of Labor, and while Trump has not vowed to abolish it as he has the Department of Education, his appointees to the department are just as hostile to workers’ interests as Carey would be at the NLRB. The department’s new secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, was touted by the Teamsters as something of a unicorn: a Republican with a pro-union background. Since her senatorial confirmation, however, she’s been the quietest member of Trump’s Amen Chorus (aka his cabinet and agency heads), while also eschewing any remarks that could be construed as pro-union.
But Trump and Musk have had their guns out for the DOL, both quantitatively (through their “reductions in force” mass layoffs) and qualitatively (through their other DOL appointments that have prompted pro-worker staffers to leave in droves). Trump’s nominee to be the department’s solicitor—its chief legal strategist and advocate—is Jonathan Berry, a onetime clerk for the union-loathing Sam Alito, an alumnus of Morgan Lewis, a partner at Boyden Gray (a leading Republican law firm), and the author of Project 2025’s chapter on the DOL. In that chapter, Berry advocated reducing the department’s restrictions on teenagers working on hazardous jobs if they’d obtained parental consent, and overturning its “walk like a duck” standards for supposed independent contractors who are really just regular employees, and thus covered by wage and hour laws.
Berry’s further stance on worker rights, if one were needed, became even clearer in a colloquy he had with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) during one congressional hearing last year. In it, Berry explicitly and enthusiastically supported Trump’s right to fire up to 50,000 federal civil servants if they failed to adequately reflect and promote Trump’s worldview. Asked by Khanna if he agreed that Trump could do that, Berry answered, “100 percent.”
As late as this January, Berry, still in private practice, was in court arguing against the Labor Department for its insistence that a Louisiana home care agency was legally required to pay overtime to its workers, whose regular hourly pay was roughly $9. In the process, Berry and his fellow attorneys argued that the 1974 congressional act that extended the minimum wage to domestic workers was unconstitutional.
Berry’s apparent preference for subjecting large numbers of American workers to poverty-level wages by no means makes him an exception within Trump’s new Labor Department. Incoming personnel at the department’s Wage and Hour Division come disproportionately from regions of the country where wage standards have been all but nonexistent. The acting administrator of that division, Donald Harrison, comes from Alabama’s Labor Department, where he was deputy secretary. Alabama is one of the five states never to have adopted a minimum-wage law of its own. Caroline Brown, the new senior adviser of the division, was in private practice in Atlanta, where she specialized in advising employers on federal and state wage laws. Georgia is one of the three states whose own minimum hourly wage is lower than the federal $7.25. Lorenzo Riboni, the division’s new policy adviser, doesn’t appear to have come from our nation’s historic slavery belt, but does hail from the law firm of Littler Mendelson, the only firm that may exceed Morgan Lewis in its anti-union zeal.
In case none of these appointments sufficed to give DOL staffers a sense of where the department was headed, they all also received a memo from the department’s chief of staff forbidding them from engaging in any “informal conversations, emails, texts, and social media” about the department’s new doings. If they violated this gag order, staffers could face “potential criminal penalties, depending on the nature of the information and the applicable laws,” which could include “immediate disciplinary actions, up to and including termination from the DOL.” Communicating with the media would also “be treated as a serious offense.”
Not surprisingly, perhaps, fully 2,700 DOL employees—roughly 20 percent of the department’s staff—had retired or taken the administration’s buyout offer by early May, even before DOGE’s reductions in force had taken effect. As Michael Sainato has reported in The Guardian, about half of the staff at the department’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs took buyouts in response to grant cuts and threatened firings. These staffers worked to uphold worker rights in trade agreements, and delivered reports on forced and child labor in nations whose goods reach U.S. shelves. With Berry calling for relaxing the restrictions on domestic child labor (and with Republicans avidly rolling back such statutes in Florida, Iowa, and other states they control), the staffers likely concluded that the Trump administration’s interest in lessening child labor abroad was effectively nonexistent.
Like the NLRB, the DOL has also experienced a decades-long reduction in its funding. In 1980, the department was appropriated $119 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars; last year, it received $54 billion. Despite that, DOGE has it down for an additional 35 percent cut this year. There’s no direct link between these declining budgets and the declining share of unionized American workers, but both are consequences of the political economy’s profound dismissal of workers’ concerns since the advent of Reaganism. Popular dissatisfaction with that political economy has now led to a revival of popular support for unions, but that support is nowhere to be found in Donald Trump’s government, at the DOL, at the NLRB, or anyplace else.
As NLRB general counsel during Biden’s presidency, Abruzzo was probably the most innovative and effective pro-worker federal official since Sen. Robert Wagner, who authored both the NLRA and the Social Security Act 90 years ago. Today, Abruzzo definitely isn’t looking to government to advance the workers’ cause. “It’s going to take a real groundswell to hold our representatives accountable,” she says. “And not just rallies, but boycotts, sit-ins, strikes: There needs to be that sort of real collective action on a broad scale in order to shift our government to where it needs to be.”
