Biden-Era NLRB Cases Still Clog the Docket Two Years Into Trump’s Term

Nearly two years into President Donald Trump’s second term, the National Labor Relations Board is still working through a backlog and a stack of union-friendly rulings built under Joe Biden, according to a Just the News review published this week.

Biden fired the board’s general counsel on his first day and installed Jennifer Abruzzo, a union lawyer the Senate confirmed in July 2021 on a tie broken by the vice president. Abruzzo had been general counsel at the Communications Workers of America. She is now a senior adviser to the CWA president and also practices at Bush Gottlieb, a California firm that says it supports progressive social movements. The CWA reports roughly $119 million to $128 million in annual dues. Neither Abruzzo nor the union answered Just the News before publication.

When she left in January 2025, Abruzzo said there was “no putting that genie back in the bottle.” She said that if the agency did not keep the course she set, workers and their advocates would “take matters into their own hands.” Trump replaced her. The board now has three Republicans and one Democrat. The cases she sent up are still in court.

Philip Miscimarra, an Obama-appointed board member who chaired the NLRB in the first year of Trump’s first term, told Just the News the agency “ceased being an honest broker in the Biden administration.”

A report from the Jackson-Alvarez Group, a Republican consulting firm, put the backlog at about 17,000 cases, with about 10,000 pending six months or more. The NLRB did not answer Just the News. The report said the board spent the Biden years on expansive readings of the law and on technical or hypothetical violations instead of ordinary bargaining disputes. Starbucks, people familiar with the docket told Just the News, accounts for more open cases than any other employer and has tried to settle even complaints it thinks it could win. Settlements were scarce under Abruzzo, who demanded notice-readings and “make whole” payments for late fees, medical bills, mortgage interest, and job-search costs. Several appeals courts have refused to treat those remedies as within the board’s power.

Two reversals show what is still being unwound.

In Minnesota, a Home Depot employee wrote “BLM” on a work apron in 2020, refused to take it off, and resigned. An administrative law judge ruled the message was about police killings, not a group effort to change working conditions. The Biden board reversed that finding in February 2024. Chairman Lauren McFerran said workers may protest racial discrimination on the job and that a ban on the insignia was presumptively unlawful. The Eighth Circuit reversed the board in December 2025, crediting Home Depot’s argument that the display would hurt customer relations, public image, and employee safety.

At a Starbucks in Latham, New York, the board treated a firing as an anti-union pretext after a shift supervisor sent an obscenity-filled group text, skipped tasks, and opened a letter addressed to the company from the NLRB. An administrative law judge had found no violation. The Fifth Circuit reversed the board in May 2026, saying it had not dealt with evidence that no other employee had used that kind of language at a coworker. One judge called the texts “wild-eyed, profanity-laden rants” and said the board should not get a second chance. The case is still in litigation. Just the News counted nearly 30 curse words in the chains it reviewed.

The election files are older and still open as a record. A July 2023 inspector general report found “gross mismanagement” of a mail-ballot election after a whistleblower said St. Louis regional staff coordinated with Starbucks Workers United and worked to get duplicate and triplicate ballots to voters favorable to the union. A June 2024 inspector general audit found that in 49 percent of elections reviewed, at least one voter did not receive a ballot. Sen. Bill Cassidy, then the ranking Republican on the Senate health and labor committee, said the board had spent three years “issuing decisions and conducting elections in a way that ensure big labor unions get a leg up.”

In April 2022, Abruzzo issued a memo treating mandatory employer meetings on unionization as unfair labor practices even without threats or promises. Senate Republicans, led by then-Sen. Richard Burr, wrote that the memo tracked pieces of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which Congress had not passed.