NLRB Regains a Quorum, but Few Quick Changes Expected

On December 18, 2025, the U.S. Senate confirmed three nominees to the National Labor Relations Board. The nominees included James Murphy, who will now serve as Board chair, Scott Mayer, who will serve as a Board member, and Crystal Carey, who will serve as general counsel. Carey’s confirmation gives the Board a leader to oversee enforcement. And Murphy’s and Mayer’s confirmations restore the Board’s statutory quorum, allowing it to resume (more or less) normal operations. 

By statute, the Board has five members and a general counsel. All six officials are principal officers, meaning they are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Since January 2025, all but two of the positions have been vacant. In the fall of 2024, the Senate failed to confirm two nominees for vacant Board seats, leaving the Board with only three members. Then, after taking office in January, President Trump fired then-Board Member Gwynn Wilcox and then-General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. Though Wilcox sued to get her job back, her termination was ultimately upheld by a federal court of appeals. The U.S. Supreme Court also signaled (albeit in a preliminary order) that the termination was proper.

Since then, the general counsel’s functions have been performed by an acting official, William Cowen. But the Board itself has been largely unable to function. By law, the Board can act only when it has at least three confirmed members. After Wilcox’s firing, it had only two. And more recently, it fell to one, when the term of then-Member Marvin Kaplan expired. Without three members, the Board was unable to handle its ordinary work, such as resolving objections to elections and deciding unfair-labor-practice cases. Its work had largely stalled. 

The new confirmations mostly restore the Board to full operations. With three members, the Board will be able to resume deciding election objections and unfair-labor-practice cases on exceptions from the agency’s administrative law judges. It will also be able to supervise certain decisions about litigation (such as approving requests by the general counsel to seek certain injunctions in court). It may even be able to restart its rulemaking agenda, potentially exploring new regulations on topics like worker classification, representation procedures, and campaign speech. 

The jury is out on whether this Board will overrule Biden-era precedent. By custom, the Board overturns a prior decision only with a three-member majority. In the near term, the Board will have two members appointed by a Republican president and one member, David Prouty, appointed by a Democratic one. These members are unlikely to agree on which decisions to revisit or overturn. The Board’s internal doctrine may therefore remain frozen until more nominees are announced and confirmed. 

In the meantime, any change to the law likely will have to come from the courts of appeals. During the prior administration, the Board handed down a number of controversial decisions, including decisions on employer speech, remedies, and bargaining orders. These decisions have been challenged and are now working their way through litigation. Courts have already started to weigh in, and others are expected to do so soon. In the immediate term, it will be courts, not the Board, that decide where labor law goes.