That’s right: In the name of “efficiency,” hundreds of our employees now have to seek several layers of review and approval from the highest levels of management simply to perform the core functions of the NLRB.

Move fast and break things, indeed—emphasis on the “break.”

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Any election or trial assignment falling into this 30-day window will require approval from the upper echelons of Agency management, who possess unclear authority at the moment and are subject to the ever-shifting whims of DOGE.

Will this extend past 30 days? Who knows!

Many of the NLRB’s elections and trials take place in rural and remote areas of the country that are not near the Agency’s field offices. The employees who perform this work are required to use Agency-assigned credit cards to pay for hotel accommodations. This is now in chaos.

We cannot be more clear: federal labor law enforcement is under more threat than it ever has been before. Our Agency’s very existence appears to be hanging in the balance these next several months. We do not have any more staff left to spare for attrition or layoffs.

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Even more concerning is OPM’s order for agencies to prepare RIF plans. As we have warned the public, our Agency is dramatically understaffed, but OPM’s instructions make no exceptions for various staffing levels. So who are we supposed to lay off? What fat is left to trim?

Again, the Agency’s current leadership is comprised of labor lawyers. They know this is an unlawful order. They know the signal it sends when the NLRB of all agencies is violating its contractual obligations with its workers. If we are not safe, then no federal worker is safe.

The clear and obvious intent of this unlawful order is to worsen our members’ terms and conditions of employment and, eventually, try to convince them to quit the Agency altogether. Paired with the current hiring freeze, we will not be able to replace any staff that do resign.

Our members have rearranged their lives in recent years around their telework rights and the realities of the post-COVID landscape. But we have possessed telework rights for decades. The Agency has always used telework as a recruiting and retention tool versus the private sector.

The order to return to the office full-time is a blatant violation of the Agency’s collective bargaining agreements, which ensure a number of telework days that employees may use if desired. Neither the Agency nor the White House have any legal authority to issue such an order.