"National Labor Relations Board" by Geraldshields11 is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0: https://bit.ly/2z1Pikn
Americans for Tax Reform applauds the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee for advancing the nomination of Scott Mayer and urges the full Senate to swiftly confirm him, along with fellow National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) nominees James Murphy and Crystal Carey.
The Senate HELP Committee on Wednesday voted to approve the nomination of Scott Mayer to be a Member of the NLRB and sent it to the full Senate for a floor vote. Mayer is currently the chief labor counsel at the Boeing Corporation and has decades of legal experience regarding labor policy. His nomination advanced out of committee on a party-line vote of 12-11.
The NLRB has been without a quorum since January 2025, when Democrat member Gwynne Wilcox was removed, leaving only Republican Marvin Kaplan and Democrat David Prouty. Since Kaplan’s term expired in August 2025, Prouty has been the only remaining member of the NLRB, which requires at least three members to have a quorum and have the power to issue decisions.
This problem originated with a bait-and-switch strategy by Democrats, as ATR President Grover Norquist explained in an op-ed last year. The longstanding practice in the Senate had previously been to nominate a Republican and Democrat member to the NLRB simultaneously. Instead, then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) brought the nomination of Gwynne Wilcox to the floor and was able to coax the vote of Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) by promising that he would later bring a Republican nominee to the floor as a pairing for Wilcox.
Schumer lied. That vote never came. As a result, President Trump’s second term began with two Democrats and only one Republican on the NLRB, preventing his administration from taking any positive action. Until a quorum is reinstated on the NLRB with a Republican majority, the Board cannot begin the important work of reversing the harmful, anti-worker and anti-business policies developed by President Biden’s NLRB.
“It is in the best interest of America’s workers and the regulated community to have a fully functioning NLRB, but the Board has been operating without a quorum for nearly a year,” said Coalition for a Democratic Workplace Chair Kristen Swearingen, who led a coalition letter in favor of Mayer’s nomination earlier this week. “Scott Mayer is well-qualified for the position, and we urge Majority Leader Thune to schedule a floor vote and get him confirmed as quickly as possible.”
Mayer’s nomination is set to be voted on as part of an en bloc consideration of 97 Trump nominees next week. That package of nominees also includes Scott Murphy to be another Member of the NLRB and Crystal Carey to be the General Counsel of the NLRB. Murphy is a career NLRB lawyer with decades of experience at the agency. Carey is a partner at the law firm Morgan Lewis focusing on labor law. Both Murphy and Carey were advanced by the Senate HELP Committee in October.
Once these nominees are confirmed to the NLRB, the Board can finally begin to unravel the bad policies enforced by the Biden NLRB and write new decisions and rulemakings that promote worker freedom for all Americans. The Senate should move quickly to confirm Mayer, Murphy, and Carey to their important roles at the NLRB.
