Trump Deals Massive Blow to NLRB Amid Confusion Over Funding Freeze

Trump fired two prominent officials of the National Labor Relations Board while everyone was rightly worried about the federal funding freeze.

The president fired the board’s general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, who was a Biden appointee, as well as Democratic member and former Chair Gwynne Wilcox Monday evening. Their departures leave the board two members short of what it requires to actually function as the country’s top labor watchdog.

The NLRB protects nonfederal employees from unfair labor practices and preserves their right to unionize—and during the Biden administration went further than ever before in doing so. Trump’s firings come as the NLRB is already facing lawsuits from SpaceX and Amazon for apparently doing too much to protect workers.

The NLRB allows the president to remove board members only in exceptional circumstances, like negligence of duty or malfeasance.

“These moves will make it easier for bosses to violate the law and trample on workers’ legal rights on the job and fundamental freedom to organize,” AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler wrote.

Wilcox, the first Black woman to serve on the labor board, believes her firing was illegal.

“I will be pursuing all legal avenues to challenge my removal, which violates long-standing Supreme Court precedent,” she said.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Donald Trump’s federal funding freeze—which appears to have kneecapped Medicaid access nationwide—a constitutional crisis. So is anyone going to do anything about it?

A memo from the Office of Management and Budget announced that starting Tuesday at 5 p.m., there would be a freeze on all federal grants and loans, affecting nearly 2,600 agencies and programs, including nonprofit organizations that provide school meals for low-income students, safety from domestic violence, and reintegration for homeless veterans, among other services.

To resecure funding, these organizations would have to report to OMB whether they promote ideas such as environmental justice, “gender ideology,” and diversity, equity, and inclusion. They would also have to say whether they provide services to undocumented immigrants.

A second memo published by OMB Tuesday claimed that certain programs, including Medicaid, Head Start, food stamps, and Pell Grants, would be unaffected—but multiple states reported having issues accessing these programs.

Florida Representative Maxwell Frost said that his state Medicaid portal had been shut down. Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed during her first press conference that there had been a “portal outage,” but she did not confirm whether it was connected to the OMB’s memo.

At the same time, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said that Head Start’s reimbursement system was no longer working. “Don’t believe these people,” Murphy warned in a post on X, referring to the second OMB memo.

The decision to issue a blanket funding freeze has created widespread chaos and confusion Tuesday as essential government services were left in limbo.

Ocasio-Cortez slammed the administrative clusterfuck as nothing short of a constitutional crisis.

“Trump is holding all the nation’s hospitals and vital services hostage to seize power from Congress and hand it over to billionaires,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X Tuesday. “We must state the truth: this is a constitutional crisis. It’s a massive, illegal power grab that the House and Senate have a sworn duty to stop.”

So what are House Democrats doing to stop the hostile takeover? They’re meeting virtually on Wednesday, according to Punchbowl News.

The city of Chicago may be too smart for Tom Homan.

Donald Trump’s border czar appeared on CNN Tuesday complaining that Chicagoans were too knowledgeable of their basic rights.

“Sanctuary citizens are making it very difficult to arrest the criminals. For instance, Chicago, very well-educated. They’ve been educated how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE. I’ve seen many pamphlets from many NGOs: ‘Here’s how you escape ICE from arresting you’; ‘Here’s what you need to do.’ They call it ‘Know Your Rights.’ I call it ‘How to escape arrest.’”

Homan is referring to the city’s Know Your Rights campaign, launched by Mayor Brandon Johnson. The program seeks to “ensure residents of Chicago know their rights in the event of being stopped and detained by federal immigration agents.” The information is posted on video screens throughout the city’s public transit system.

The immigration czar is spearheading efforts to carry out Trump’s mass deportation plans, which have hit major cities like Chicago, Miami, Atlanta, and New York.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and his Democratic colleague Dick Durbin are demanding that Donald Trump “immediately” follow the law regarding the impromptu firings of more than a dozen inspectors general across 18 offices.

“While IGs aren’t immune from committing acts requiring their removal, and they can be removed by the president, the law must be followed,” the chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee wrote in a joint memo.

Grassley and Durbin highlighted that in ousting the prosecutors, Trump had not complied with a legally mandated 30-day notice to Congress, and had not shared the case-specific reasons for their removal.

“IGs are critical to rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and misconduct within the Executive Branch bureaucracy, which you have publicly made clear you are also intent on doing,” they continued. “Accordingly, we request that you provide Congress with a written communication that contains the ‘substantive rationale, including detailed and case-specific reasons’ for each of the IG’s removed.”

Grassley and Durbin also requested that the administration issue a list to the committee regarding proposed temporary replacements, and that the White House “work quickly” to nominate “non-partisan individuals” to formally replace the lost officials.

The mass firing targeted career prosecutors who had worked directly with former special counsel Jack Smith as he developed two cases against Trump: one focused on the forty-fifth president’s alleged retention of classified documents after he left the White House, and another on Trump’s involvement in the January 6 riots. Smith’s team had at least 40 attorneys investigating Trump after the end of his first term.

The matter boiled down to “trust” for the incoming administration, according to a spokesperson, who claimed on Monday that the prosecutors had weaponized the government against the MAGA leader and could not be relied upon to advance Trump’s agenda.

Rank-and-file prosecutors are rarely terminated by incoming administrations for their involvement in sensitive investigations, according to the Associated Press.

The firing of Smith’s team follows a major reshuffling of key officials at the Justice Department, which last week conducted a leadership shakeup by reassigning as many as 20 senior officials to different departments.

Donald Trump’s halting of federal funding to state and local governments has resulted in Medicaid web portals being down in all 50 states. 

Senator Ron Wyden posted on BlueSky Tuesday that his staff confirms disruptions in the health care program across the country, potentially hurting millions of low-income Americans including children, senior citizens, pregnant women, and people with disabilities.  

Officials in other states like Florida and Illinois, where about four million residents rely on Medicaid in each state, confirmed issues with their Medicaid portals. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker said state agencies also began experiencing issues accessing federal funding and disbursement systems. 

The disruption was caused by the Monday release of a memo from Trump’s Office of Management and Budget announcing a pause in federal funding to take effect at 5 p.m. EST on Tuesday. The memo sparked mass confusion in state and local governments, as well as nonprofit organizations across the country, well before then. 

The memo called for a “pause” on “all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance,” and any other programs that included “D.E.I., woke gender ideology and the Green New Deal,” but ultimately went much further than that. As a result, six state attorneys general announced plans on Tuesday to file lawsuits seeking to halt the funding freeze, joining a coalition of small businesses and nonprofits that have already sued the administration themselves. 

The Trump administration has tried to clarify in a new memo that the funding freeze is not “across-the-board,” but that may not mitigate the flurry of lawsuits, as the funding in question was already appropriated by Congress. It seems that the new president has just set off a big legal battle.