New Board and General Counsel Appear to be Focused on Clearing Backlog
New GC Memo says no new mandatory submissions to advice for now.
General Counsel Crystal Carey and Board Members James Murphy and Scott Mayer were sworn in on January 7, 2026. In their first three weeks, the new appointees appear to have been focused solely on clearing out the low-hanging fruit of the NLRB backlog that accumulated over the last year.
The Board has issued 43 decisions during this time period:
Seventeen of them were cases in which there were no exceptions filed to an ALJ decision and so the Board adopted the ALJ decision as its own.
Fourteen of them were requests for review of a Regional Director decision, which the new Board denied with the typical conclusion that the requests presented “no substantial issues warranting review.”
Four of them were default judgments.
Two were denials of petitions to revoke subpoenas.
So far, none has involved significant Board law issues.
Yesterday, GC Carey released GC 26-02 in which she explained that her priority would be to clear the agency’s backlog rather than to undertake new initiatives aimed at overturning or establishing new precedent. For this reason, Carey is declining to release a memo listing out topics that require a mandatory submission to Advice. New GCs typically release this sort of memo to indicate what precedents they are seeking to overturn or establish.
Of course, we are only three weeks into the new Board leadership and it is conceivable that, after some time working through the backlog, they will become more reform-minded and interested in pursuing new legal theories and test cases. But for now, the agency’s output signals a single-minded focus on backlog reduction.