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national labor relations board
'An American President Is Not a King': Judge Reinstates Labor Regulator Illegally Fired by Trump
"The president seems intent on pushing the bounds of his office and exercising his power in a manner violative of clear statutory law to test how much the courts will accept the notion of a presidency that is supreme."
Mar 06, 2025
A federal judge on Thursday reinstated Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic member of the National Labor Relations Board, and suggested that U.S. President Donald Trump's attempt to fire her was an example of the Republican testing how much he can exceed his constitutional powers.
Wilcox filed a federal lawsuit in February, after Trump ousted her and NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell—who was appointed by former President Barack Obama to serve in the District of Columbia—declared Wilcox's dismissal "unlawful and void."
"The Constitution and case law are clear in allowing Congress to limit the president's removal power and in allowing the courts to enjoin the executive branch from unlawful action," Howell wrote in a 36-page opinion. She also sounded the alarm about arguments made by lawyers for the defendants, Trump and Marvin Kaplan, chair of the NLRB.
"A president who touts an image of himself as a 'king' or a 'dictator,' perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the U.S. Constitution."
"Defendants' hyperbolic characterization that legislative and judicial checks on executive authority, as invoked by plaintiff, present 'extraordinary intrusion[s] on the executive branch,' ...is both incorrect and troubling," the judge wrote. "Under our constitutional system, such checks, by design, guard against executive overreach and the risk such overreach would pose of autocracy."
She stressed that "an American president is not a king—not even an 'elected' one—and his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants like plaintiff is not absolute, but may be constrained in appropriate circumstances, as are present here."
"A president who touts an image of himself as a 'king' or a 'dictator,' perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the U.S. Constitution," Howell asserted. "In our constitutional order, the president is tasked to be a conscientious custodian of the law, albeit an energetic one, to take care of effectuating his enumerated duties, including the laws enacted by the Congress and as interpreted by the judiciary."
The judge cited a widely criticized February 19 social media post from the White House, which features an image of Trump in a crown, with text that states, "Long live the king."
"The president seems intent on pushing the bounds of his office and exercising his power in a manner violative of clear statutory law to test how much the courts will accept the notion of a presidency that is supreme," Howell warned. "The courts are now again forced to determine how much encroachment on the legislature our Constitution can bear and face a slippery slope toward endorsing a presidency that is untouchable by the law."
The president's attempt to fire Wilcox halted federal labor law enforcement in the United States. AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler celebrated Howell's ruling in a Thursday statement, saying that "more than a month after Trump effectively shut down the NLRB by illegally firing Gwynne Wilcox, denying it the quorum it needs to hold union-busters accountable, the court ordered Wilcox immediately returned to her seat, allowing the NLRB to get back to its essential work."
"The court also sent an important message that a president cannot undermine an independent agency by simply removing a member of the board because he disagrees with her decisions," she said. "Working people around the country count on equal justice and fair decision-making from an independent NLRB—and today, because of Wilcox's commitment to the mission of the NLRB and her refusal to stand by as Trump illegally removed her from the board, the NLRB can get back to work."
Wilcox isn't the only federal worker who has challenged the president's power to fire her. As Politicodetailed:
On Thursday, a federal workplace watchdog fired by Trump—Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger—dropped his legal bid to reclaim his post after a federal appeals court permitted his termination. Cathy Harris, a member of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which oversees the grievance process for many federal employees, is also resisting Trump’s effort to remove her and was reinstated last month by a federal judge.
The Supreme Court likely will soon weigh in on Congress' ability to insulate executive branch officials from being fired by the president without cause. With Dellinger's decision to drop his legal fight, Harris' case appears likeliest to reach the high court in the near-term. It’s possible Wilcox's case will get folded into that ongoing fight.
The nation's highest court has a right-wing supermajority that includes three Trump appointees, though they have at times ruled against the president—including on Wednesday, when five justices refused to overturn a lower court order about foreign aid.
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Trump Set to Install Anti-Union Attack Dog as Director of Key Labor Office
One watchdog group warned that Elisabeth Messenger is "a real ideologue" whose selection underscores the Trump administration's hostility to organized labor.
Mar 04, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump is reportedly expected to pick the former head of an anti-union organization that supports so-called "right-to-work" laws to lead a key office within the Department of Labor, where the administration is working to gut enforcement efforts against lawbreaking employers.
Citing two unnamed sources, HuffPostreported Monday that Elisabeth Messenger, former CEO of Americans for Fair Treatment (AFFT), is set to become director of the Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS), whose purpose is to promote "labor-management transparency by making available reports showing unions' financial condition and employers' expenditures for their activities in persuading workers during union organizing campaigns."
HuffPost noted that "as the head of OLMS, Messenger would be charged with making sure unions, as well as anti-union consultants, make lawful disclosures to the government about their work."
Bob Funk, director of the watchdog group LaborLab, told HuffPost that Messenger is "a real ideologue" and her selection signals that the Trump administration will likely "go after not just public-sector unions but worker centers, too."
The outlet observed that AFFT "promotes right-to-work laws and advises public-sector workers like teachers on how to opt out of paying union dues."
Elisabeth Messenger, former CEO of the anti-union group "Americans for Fair Treatment," will be tasked with making sure anti-union consultants disclose their work.
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— LaborLab (@laborlab.bsky.social) March 3, 2025 at 4:59 PM
After posturing as a champion of American workers on the campaign trail, Trump kicked off his second White House term with what one observer described as "rapid-fire anti-worker actions," including mass firings of federal employees and the termination of key labor officials.
One of the fired officials, former National Labor Relations Board Chair Gwynne Wilcox, is suing Trump in federal court arguing her termination was illegal.
News that Trump is poised to install Messenger at the helm of OLMS comes roughly two weeks after former Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-Ore.), the president's pick to lead the Labor Department, vowed during her Senate confirmation hearing to defend "right-to-work laws" and said she no longer supports pro-union legislation that would dramatically weaken them.
That legislation, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, is set to be reintroduced Tuesday by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a group of congressional Democrats, and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.).
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Trump Is Following the Project 2025 Playbook to Destroy Workers’ Rights
The massive curbs on workers’ rights that have occurred during the first month of the Trump administration signal it’s likely that plenty more will follow during his tenure in office.
Feb 23, 2025
Only a month into his second term as president, Donald Trump is well underway toward destroying crucial rights of American workers.
Currently, the best known of these threatened rights is probably job security, for the sudden onset of Trump’s mass, indiscriminate firing of more than 200,000 federal government workers has sparked a furor. Employed by the Departments of Education and Veterans Affairs, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Forest Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other vital U.S. agencies, these workers appear to have been simply tossed out of their jobs without honoring the legal requirement of due process, including performance-based evaluations.
Trump claimed that the mass firings were necessary to save money and make the government more efficient. But the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, Everett Kelley, retorted that the firings were really “about power,” with Trump “gutting the federal government, silencing workers, and forcing agencies into submission to a radical agenda that prioritizes cronyism over competence.”
Thus, if Project 2025 does serve as a guide to Trump administration policies toward workers’ rights, we should expect Trump’s future implementation of Project 2025’s recommendations for remarkably severe federal government measures against workers and their unions.
In addition, on January 31, Trump announced plans to nullify contracts recently negotiated and signed with the labor unions representing federal workers. Justifying this action, the president said that the contracts had been negotiated by former President Joe Biden “to harm my administration.”
Trump selected an appropriate figure to undermine workers’ rights when he appointed Elon Musk as the head of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man and Trump’s largest campaign contributor, was well known as rabidly anti-labor, and had repeatedly clashed with workers at the giant companies he owned, among them Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter). Indeed, by January 2025, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) had 24 open investigations into labor law violations by these three firms, including alleged surveillance of employees at Twitter and interference with union organizing at Tesla. In turn, a day after the NLRB accused Musk’s SpaceX company of retaliating against workers who had dared to criticize his employment practices, SpaceX filed a lawsuit to have the NLRB, established by Congress in 1935, declared unconstitutional and terminated.
Not surprisingly, Trump moved quickly to paralyze the activities of the NLRB, a federal agency created to guarantee American workers’ right to union representation. By firing the acting NLRB chair, Gwynne Wilcox, long before her term of office ended in 2026, Trump not only acted illegally, but left the NLRB without the quorum necessary to operate, thus shutting it down.
“We’re fighting that tooth and nail,” declared AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler. The firing of Wilcox “did exactly what Trump wanted to do, which was to stymie the one agency that workers rely on when they’re in an organizing drive and taking risks and getting fired. They no longer have the board they need to protect them.”
As part of the same attack upon the NLRB, Trump fired Jennifer Abruzzo, the agency’s general counsel, and replaced her with a Republican loyalist. During her tenure, Abruzzo had issued a series of memos that prohibited common anti-labor practices by corporations. These memos banned abusive electronic monitoring and surveillance of workers on the job, captive audience meetings (in which workers were forced to listen to anti-union pep talks), and severance agreements with overly broad non-disparagement and confidentiality sections (which prevented former workers from discussing workplace issues). These pro-worker directives and more were quickly reversed by her Republican successor at the NLRB.
The Trump administration also launched a devastating assault on another federal agency established to safeguard workers’ rights, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to bar workplace discrimination, the EEOC, too, lost the ability to continue operations when Trump quickly fired two of its commissioners. An administration official maintained that the two dismissed EEOC commissioners were “far-left appointees with radical records.”
These challenges to the independence and functioning of both agencies are quite extraordinary. The presidential removal of an NLRB board member and of two EEOC commissioners is unprecedented, for none have ever been fired before in the long histories of both agencies. Moreover, by congressional statute, these are independent federal entities, ostensibly shielded from presidential interference. And now, thanks to this interference, they are unable to operate.
As these and other curbs on workers’ rights have all occurred during the first month of the Trump administration, it’s likely that plenty more will follow during his tenure in office. And there are numerous indications that that they will.
After all, the playbook for much of what the Trump administration has done so far―such as its mass firing of federal workers―is Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-developed blueprint for Trump’s second term, and one of its key architects is Russell Vought, appointed by Trump as the new White House budget director. As an Associated Press dispatch notes, this office is “one of the most influential positions in the federal government,” acting “as a nerve center for the White House, developing its budget, policy priorities, and agency rule-making.”
Thus, if Project 2025 does serve as a guide to Trump administration policies toward workers’ rights, we should expect Trump’s future implementation of Project 2025’s recommendations for remarkably severe federal government measures against workers and their unions. These include banning public employee unions, as well as empowering the states to ban private sector unions and ignore federal minimum wage, overtime pay, and child labor laws.
All told, these developments are forcing American workers to address the old union question: “Which Side Are You On?”.
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