Cleaning House

Among the many odious appointments of Donald Trump is Peter Robb, to be general counsel at the National Labor Relations Board. This guy is the ultimate industry hack who helps lead an agency he would like to destroy. At the behest of SEIU, Biden is firing him, even though his term extends for another year.

Robb is the first general counsel to be forced out in more than half a century, a move that suggests the partisan rancor that befell the normally staid agency during the Trump era could become the new normal. Robb’s Democratic replacement, who needs Senate confirmation, would be able to begin reversing the prior administration’s changes to agency procedure, though Democrats on the NLRB will still face gridlock until Republicans lose the board majority in August.

An NLRB spokesman didn’t immediately respond Wednesday when asked for comment. White House spokespeople didn’t immediately respond when asked for comment.

Robb clashed with Democrats on Capitol Hill during his tenure, especially over the agency’s failure to spend the entire allocation of its annual budget and a short-lived plan to centralize control over field operations and shorten investigations.

Only one other general counsel, Robert Denham, was asked to leave in 1950 at the request of then-President Harry Truman over the execution of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act. Denham voluntarily resigned.

There’s a lot of horrible people still in the government. It’s going to take extraordinary work to get rid of them. This is a positive first step.