Why Did the NLRB Dismiss a Bunch of Cases Right Before the Government Shutdown?
A statistical analysis.
Starting on October 1, 2025, the federal government was shutdown for 43 days. In order to get a sense of the impact that had on the agency, I have produced the following analysis using the NLRB’s publicly available case management data. For the most part, what happened is what you’d expect: case filings and case closings fell dramatically in October and early November until resuming their usual rates in December. But the data also show something unexpected: in the month before the shutdown, September 2025, there was a massive, unprecedented spike in the number of cases closed by the agency.
This spike appears to have mostly consisted of non-adjusted dismissals of unfair labor practice charges alleging that an employer had refused to bargain, bargained in bad faith, repudiated a collective-bargaining agreement, or modified a CBA in the middle of a CBA’s term. These dismissed charges were typically quite old, having been filed 3.2 years prior to September 2025 on average.
Filings and Closures
In the average month between January 2020 and September 2025, the total number of cases — both unfair labor practice cases and representation cases — filed at the NLRB was 1,790. During the shutdown month, the number of cases filed fell to 375. During this period, the NLRB website was mostly offline and the e-file system was closed down. It’s not entirely clear to me how any cases were filed in October, but perhaps some were sent in by mail and subsequently docketed with the filing date on the form.
The data for closed cases looks very similar except that, in September 2025, the month before the shutdown, the agency closed around 1,000 more unfair labor practice cases than it usually does.
September 2025
To better understand what happened in September 2025, I initially broke down the cases closed during the month by the reason they were closed and compared that breakdown to the same figures for July 2025 and August 2025. The most plausible explanation for this anomaly was that the General Counsel had made some kind of decision to dismiss a lot of cases en masse. If that is what happened, then we should see a big spike in non-adjusted dismissals, which are cases that are dismissed without the parties having taken any action to become compliant. This is what I found. The number of non-adjusted dismissals increased by nearly 1,000 in September 2025.
From there, I wanted to see if this dismissal activity was happening across the board or just for specific kinds of unfair labor practice charges. I found that the vast majority of the spike came from dismissals of charges alleging refusal to bargain, bad faith bargaining, repudiation of a CBA, or a midterm modification of a CBA.
From here, we can check to see how many of the cases that make these allegations were closed through a non-adjusted dismissal. Here we see the starkest difference between September 2025 and the prior two months.
Initially, this might seem alarming as it suggests that the NLRB may have arbitrarily dropped a large number of unfair labor practice charges. But the different ages of the dismissed charges suggest otherwise. The charges of this type that were dismissed this way in July and August of 2025 were, on average, 393 days old. In September, the same charges were 1,173 days old. Based on this, it appears that some sort of decision was made to close a batch of old cases of these specific types.
Update: Many helpful readers have emailed in to note that GC 25-10 established a new requirement that unions who filed unfair labor practice charges that were deferred to arbitration would be required to file a status report twice a year, once on March 15 and once on September 15. This mass dismissal thus resulted from failures to file the newly-required status reports.