The board you sort is the board that gets staffed

From a player report

• Auto-assign staffs the contracts in the order the board shows them. Sorted by days left, the most urgent job is the one that gets a team. Before, the cards were reordered while staffing still walked the order you had dragged them into, so a card at the top could sit untouched. Dragging still sets the order whenever the board is sorted by priority.
• The board's sort is kept in the save. It used to fall back to the dragged order every time the game started.

Reported through the in-game button, reproduced with a test that shows exactly that - and that now keeps it fixed.