Biden fires Trump-era NLRB lawyer



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President Biden has fired the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) general counsel after refusing to resign.

Biden asked Trump-appointed Peter Robb to resign on Wednesday. He refused to resign and was fired later in the day, a White House spokesperson confirmed to The Hill.

Robb was sworn in in November 2017 for a four-year term due to end in November. The NLRB is an independent body governed by a five-person board of directors and a general counsel.

In a letter to the White House obtained by Bloomberg Law, Robb said he would not resign and that his dismissal would “definitely undermine” the agency’s work.

“I respectfully decline to resign from my Senate-confirmed four-year tenure as NLRB General Counsel less than 10 months before my term expires,” Robb wrote.

The NLRB website says Robb’s “tour of duty”, which began on November 11, 2017, ended on Wednesday.

Biden’s pick for the next NLRB general counsel will need to be confirmed by the Senate, and the Democratic pick would work alongside the current board of directors made up of a Democrat and three Republicans, with one vacant post.

An NLRB general counsel has not been asked to resign since 1950, when President Truman called for Robert Denham’s resignation over an anti-union bill, Bloomberg Law reported.

Representative Virginia Foxx (North Carolina), the top Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, criticized Biden on Wednesday for calling for Robb’s resignation, saying her calls for unity and civil discourse were already turning out to be empty aspirations.

“The Biden administration appears to be rewarding its Big Labor friends from day one with this inappropriate request that NLRB General Counsel Robb immediately resign or be forcibly removed,” Foxx said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Biden chose Lauren McFerran to chair the NLRB. McFerran had been on the board since December 2014 and was confirmed in July for another term ending in December 2024.



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