With Donald Trump’s election victory, leadership of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) will change over to Republican hands in January. There are certain policy areas that Trump is personally interested in, but labor law does not seem to be one of them. The direction of the NLRB is thus likely to be determined not by Trumpian idiosyncrasies but rather by the usual Republican business interests.

In the next couple of months, look for the following possible actions:

1. General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo removed on January 20. Historically, NLRB general counsels (GCs) have been replaced after their term ends. But the Biden administration departed from that norm in 2021 and removed GC Peter Robb from office on the first day of Joe Biden’s presidency. At the time, there was some uncertainty about whether that was legal, but the courts subsequently indicated that they would allow it. The Trump administration is likely to follow the same course of action and remove Abruzzo on the first day of Trump’s presidency.

2. New list of mandatory submissions to Advice. Whoever replaces Abruzzo should issue a memo that contains a new list of mandatory submissions to the Division of Advice. Abruzzo issued hers in August 2021. Robb issued his in December 2017. This list will indicate what NLRB precedents the new GC will try to change by bringing a test case to a newly composed board. Based on recent history, this list may include bringing cases with the hope of overturning 1) Stericycle and McLaren Macomb, which dealt with rules like confidentiality and non-disparagement that interfere with protected activity; 2) Lion Elastomers, which dealt with the standard for determining when the way an employee engages in protected activity becomes so offensive or problematic that it loses protection; and 3) Fresh & Easy, which dealt with the circumstances in which an employee, acting alone, should be considered to be engaging in concerted activity.

3. Potential removal of board members on January 20. As with the GC, the five members of the NLRB have historically been replaced only after their term is over. The National Labor Relations Act states that these board members can be removed by the president for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause.” But the boutique management-side legal theory of the moment is that these for-cause removal protections are actually unconstitutional. Thus it is conceivable that the Trump administration will decide to remove certain board members on the first day of Trump’s presidency, both to change the partisan composition of the board and to create some amount of legal chaos around the agency.

4. Potential removal of high-level NLRB staffers. Republican policy people have made a lot of noise lately about changes to civil service classifications that would make it so that federal workers in the Senior Executive Service (SES) or federal workers who are below SES but still deemed to have a significant policymaking function could be fired by the president. This would seem to describe the agency’s regional directors, the various division heads working under the GC, and certain other staffers.