In the 90 years the National Labor Relations Board has been in existence—through the Great Depression, World War II, and up to the current era—no president had ever fired a single Senate-confirmed board member. The reason is simple: Congress didn’t make it easy. Under the National Labor Relations Act, lawmakers long ago decided that a “member of the Board may be removed by the President, upon notice and hearing, for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause.” The reason for this provision was to insulate the independent agency and its workings from the whims of politics, if not a mercurial chief executive with little regard for workers and their welfare.
That uninterrupted streak ended a couple of weeks ago, when, in a late-night email purportedly sent on behalf of Donald Trump, Gwynne Wilcox—the former chair of NLRB and one of two Democratic members of the board—was unceremoniously fired for not “operating in a manner consistent with the objectives of my administration.” “In my judgment, the National Labor Relations Board is not presently fulfilling its responsibility to the American people,” the email read. “The NLRB wields immense executive power over private employment relationships and relations with unions—an area with vast economic consequences.” (The email was sloppy, as it misidentified Jennifer Abruzzo, the agency’s then general counsel—who was also fired—as a board member.)
Wilcox, who chaired the labor watchdog until the first week of the new administration, didn’t go quietly into the night. She sued the president and Marvin Kaplan, the Republican who succeeded her as chair, and wants a judge to declare the termination illegal and reinstate her—not unlike what the NLRB itself would do on behalf of workers who are victims of unfair labor practices. By law, her term ends on August 27, 2028. And by law, her removal now means there are not enough members for the board to operate as Congress designed it. If that’s not faithless execution of the law, then nothing is.
Something that goes unsaid in Wilcox’s lawsuit, but is evident to anyone who watched Wilcox talk about her firing on CBS News, is that she’s the first Black woman to lead the NLRB. One former employee at the agency told me they found her case and her stance inspiring. Why Trump went after her and not the other Democratic appointee on the board, a white man, is in the eye of the beholder—and part and parcel with the administration’s obsession with getting rid of decades-old policies to ensure a vibrant, diverse workforce that looks like the people who are served by it.
In an interview, Wilcox told me that people in and outside the NLRB are rallying behind her, but noted that the litigation was not just about her, but about the agency and the structure set up by Congress to protect working people. “It’s not just solely for myself, but we need to be able to do our job,” Wilcox said. “And the agency is the vehicle by which employees can be protected under the law.”
One wrinkle in her lawsuit, which is telegraphed in the termination notice she received, is that the Trump administration is all but certain to urge the Supreme Court to declare the removal protections Congress gave to appointees like Wilcox unconstitutional. During the first Trump administration, the Supreme Court did exactly that with the removal protections for the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—another agency Trump-acolytes Russ Vought and Elon Musk are dead set on destroying—and doing the same to the NLRB is simply the next shoe waiting to drop.
“Although Ms. Wilcox has no desire to aid the President in establishing a test case, she is also cognizant of the fact that, if no challenge is made, the President will have effectively succeeded in rendering the NLRA’s protections—and, by extension, that of other independent agencies—nugatory,” her lawyers wrote.
In other words, Wilcox is standing up for the world we live in today, not the world as the Trump administration and the Supreme Court may one day wish it to be. As her lawyers put it in a separate filing urging an expedited ruling in her favor, docketed on Monday, the endgame here is for our current rulers “to adopt a new, more aggressive vision of presidential power that would effectively abolish independent agencies in the United States.”
Federal civil servants, who in normal times simply keep their heads down and do their jobs in their respective corners of the government, take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to “well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office” on which they are about to enter.
Consistent with that duty, they have begun to protest and resist the lawlessness they’ve encountered during the first month of the second Trump administration—both in and outside formal legal channels. Sometimes even in defiance of gag orders. During this uncertain period, many of them were revulsed by the bizarre “Fork in the Road” directive offering them a so-called “deferred resignation program”—under which the Office of Personnel Management, essentially the human resources arm of the executive branch, has pinky-promised them seven months’ worth of their taxpayer-funded salary plus benefits in exchange for no work.
In response, among other urgent actions, a group of civil servants got their heads together and organized a public letter addressed to their confused and distraught colleagues dispersed throughout the government, counseling them to not buy into what one local union leader said “has all the markings of a scam.” (As has been widely reported, the offer is nearly identical to what Musk offered Twitter employees when he bought the company.) More to the point, the letter aims to make clear that accepting the offer would undermine federal workers’ oaths and put them in the same law-free zone the president inhabits.
“The United States needs a lawful, committed, and non-partisan civil service to deliver critical services and act as a bulwark against corruption,” the letter reads. “We are being forced to make this decision with incomplete information and with our livelihoods at risk. It is difficult and unpleasant. But, for now, we do have a choice. Please choose with care.” In a series of posts on X last week, a national labor organization noticed how the goalposts from OPM keep moving and the legal sketchiness keeps increasing, and expressed a commitment to stay their ground. “We will not resign,” the union wrote.
In the popular /fednews subreddit, one anonymous civil servant put it more succinctly: “Take your resignation scheme and fuck right off.” A judge on Monday kept the mass purge offer blocked for now.
Writing in Slate, one federal employee at OPM noted how the directives the federal workforce has been receiving put her on a collision course with the oath she took, thus “making it especially awful that the threat to our government is coming from inside my own office building.” What’s striking about her account, which is as close as you can get to the source of the psychological warfare the Trump administration is waging against the federal workforce, is the solidarity she has encountered in the midst of it all. “Every increasingly desperate memo and email is driving us to form community, join our unions, and get to better know our co-workers,” the employee wrote. “I had to turn off notifications for Signal, the secure communication app, because my group texts from co-workers ping multiple times per hour.” A union-led lunchtime rally took place Tuesday at the Capitol.
None of this deters litigation, which has been a key tool to help keep the assault on the civil service at bay. Federal-worker unions have been at the forefront of challenging the battering ram of moves aimed at destabilizing them, their livelihoods, and the mission of the agencies they occupy, both here and abroad. From legal challenges to stop the bleeding of thousands of USAID workers stationed overseas to those that seek to rein in the Musk-led cabal rummaging over sensitive government records, unions and their lawyers have been on the move. Judges have begun to respond, largely in their favor, but the rulings are temporary and on tenuous ground since they’re all at a very preliminary stage. A court can only go so far in impeding a chief executive and empowered underlings hellbent on hollowing out entire agencies set up by Congress, as happened to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over the weekend. (There’s a union lawsuit trying to stop that too.)
And independent of how the courts rule, if they do so in time to prevent further damage, there’s the separate and far more dangerous problem of what to do with an administration that isn’t just willing to break the law, but to remain in open defiance of courts that tell it to stop breaking it. Yale Law School graduate JD Vance fired the first shot across that bow over the weekend when he wrote on X that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
Defying court orders is how constitutional chaos unfolds. But the crisis began weeks ago, when the president ignored Congress’s express directives on how federal funding should be spent, and a critical mass of lawmakers rolled over and have yet to reassert themselves. The only way to cure executive arrogance—and yet more arrogation of power—is for people to mobilize, stand up, and remind those they elected where true power lies.
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