On April 3, 2025, the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace (CDW), an anti-union trade association, sent Attorney General Pam Bondi a letter urging her to invalidate fifteen National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) cases that were decided during the Biden administration.
It is common for the NLRB to reverse some of its precedent whenever control of the presidency changes from one party to the other. The way this has always worked is that the general counsel brings a case through the NLRB adjudicative process and then the board uses the case to announce that they are establishing a new rule on a particular point of law.
The letter from CDW seizes upon Executive Order No. 14215 and President Donald Trump’s full embrace of the conservative unitary executive theory to argue that AG Bondi can and should just declare that certain NLRB precedent is no longer binding.
This sort of thing has never happened before. The NLRB is an independent agency, and the attorney general has no statutory role in how it operates. Such a move by the AG would be illegal under prevailing understandings of administrative law, but of course Trump and the conservative legal movement are seeking to have the Supreme Court invalidate a large swath of administrative law on the theory that it unconstitutionally restricts the power of the president.
The Economic Policy Institute has a piece about the letter, written by former NLRB member Lauren McFerran and AFL-CIO general counsel Lynn Rhinehart, explaining how unusual such a move would be. The CDW letter and a summary of it can be found here.
This letter from the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace (dated April 3, 2025) urges Attorney General Pam Bondi to direct the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to no longer treat…
Auteur: Matt Bruenig
