The current National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) inherited an employer docket of roughly 16,000 open unfair labor practice charges. More than half of them were over a year old, and many were tied to enforcement decisions made between 2021 and 2024.
For employers, the stakes are high. An open ULP charge means continuing exposure on an unresolved claim, potentially with back pay and remedies that can increase the longer the charge stays open. For a backlog of this size, these exposures are frequently lasting for years.
We analyzed 190,743 ULP charges filed from 2016 through May 2026 and examined how and why that crushing backlog formed. We’ve crunched the data and linked the problem to the prior administration’s enforcement push, not to any staffing pressures that predate or follow.
Our full analysis pinpoints the exact quarter the slowdown began and shows why 2025’s record closures were mostly old cases that barely dent the backlog. Read it here. A summary follows below.
A Backlog That Kept Building, And Then Stagnated
Through 2020, the Board closed charges at roughly the rate it received them, holding open employer inventory near 5,800 to 6,000. Our analysis shows inventory climbing to 17,409 by 2024, a 152 percent jump. At the same time, the backlog aged, with cases open over a year rising to 8,528.
The issue can be directly traced to General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo’s August 2021 memo, GC 21-04, requiring regional offices to send certain types of cases to headquarters for review before they could act. Roughly 87 percent of employer cases—firings, discipline, refusals to bargain, and more—were potentially subject to this process. That created a caseload bottleneck, which was exacerbated by other Abruzzo-era decisions that intensified an enforcement push against employers
In our full report, we pinpoint the drop to a single quarter, when closures of every type, even quick dismissals, fell off at once in a front-end collapse. See the breakdown.
Due To An Enforcement Push, Not Staffing
NLRB staffing is the competing explanation for this backlog, but that reason doesn’t carry weight. The agency had already shed 26 percent of its workforce by FY2019, yet processing time still sat at 66 days. By FY2023, the median time to close a case had nearly doubled to 131 days, which is far beyond what a further 6 percent staff decline can explain.
Our analysis, generously run in the staffing argument’s favor, shows that only 20 to 30 percent of the slowdown can be attributed to caseload. The other 70 to 80 percent of the slowdown is due to enforcement priorities. The informal settlement rate, which fell to 3.6 percent by FY2024, supports the same conclusion: enforcement priorities, rather than staffing, produced roughly 6,700 open cases above baseline.
Who Paid The Highest Cost: Small Employers
Our analysis shows that 61 percent of open cases sit at workplaces of 100 or fewer employees and 45 percent at 50 or fewer. Of those, roughly 9,800 were filed during the Abruzzo era and remain open.
A second Abruzzo memo, GC 21-07 on settlement terms, helps to explain why these employers were hit the hardest. That memo pushed regions to demand the full payout a case could win at trial, with no discount for settling early. A large employer can absorb the cost of these cases or hand it off to counsel. A 40-person shop faces a take-it-or-litigate-it dilemma that it can’t easily price. For that employer, an open charge hangs over every later decision, often for two years or more.
The Dig-Out Is Underway
Acting GC William Cowen rescinded dozens of Abruzzo memoranda, including GC 21-04, in February 2025, and GC Crystal Carey’s early-2026 guidance prioritized settlement and streamlining of cases. Since then, the agency closed 18,280 charges in 2025, the highest since 2019, but 69 percent were Abruzzo-era filings, and a settled charge now takes a median of 657 days old, versus 279 days prior to 2021.
Our analysis separates this backlog liquidation, or the clearing of old cases, from gains in speed on new ones, and shows why the record 2025 total overstates the recovery. See how we tell them apart in the full report. The backlog fell in 2025 for the first time since 2020, but new cases are still moving slowly.
The full LRI Consulting Services, Inc. analysis covers these arguments across 190,743 charges, and we have data behind every figure.
