Vance Bars Microsoft From the Green-Card PERM Program, Accusing the Company of Visa Fraud

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2026 — The Trump administration’s crackdown on employment-based immigration escalated sharply Thursday, as Vice President JD Vance announced that Microsoft is being barred from the federal program companies use to sponsor foreign workers for green cards — accusing the tech giant of fraud. According to the New York Post, Vance appeared at a press conference in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building alongside White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Attorney General Todd Blanche and newly confirmed Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, and said the suspension follows an investigation by the anti-fraud task force he chairs.

02 Vance’s Accusation

Vance’s case against Microsoft was built on three numbers: roughly 6,000 American workers laid off last year, 6,300 H-1B visas obtained, and nearly 3,000 green cards. “If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants,” Vance told reporters, as quoted by the Post.

He went further, calling Microsoft the worst offender in the country: “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused the system more than Microsoft,” he said, according to Fox News’ account of the briefing. And he framed the alleged misconduct as a legal matter, not just a policy disagreement. “The fraud is that they’re making representations when applying for this program that are fundamentally illegitimate and therefore ultimately illegal,” Vance said, per the Post.

The administration’s argument, as Vance and other officials laid it out in the briefing: the H-1B visa is how foreign workers get into the United States in the first place, and the PERM program is how they stay — by sponsoring them for permanent residency. Officials alleged Microsoft misrepresented its needs in applying for permanent residency for its foreign workers, arguing the program is meant only for workers with “hyper-specialized” skill sets that can’t be easily found in the U.S. Instead, they accused the company of using it primarily to replace skilled American employees with similarly qualified immigrants it could pay less to do the same job, according to the Post’s reporting.

One important caveat, noted in Newsmax’s contemporaneous reporting: Vance’s remarks did not establish that each visa or green card represented a new hire replacing a laid-off worker. The 6,000-to-6,300-to-3,000 math is the administration’s framing, not an established one-to-one substitution.

“Our message to Microsoft is: you’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers,” Vance said, as quoted by USA Today. “You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants.”

03 Sonderling’s Hammer — and the Universities

The Microsoft suspension was the headline, but Labor Secretary Sonderling widened the blast radius considerably. According to the New York Post, he announced that Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini — some of the largest IT firms in the world — along with software maker Adobe, would also be suspended from the PERM program.

“We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies,” Sonderling said, as quoted by the Post. “Since 2009, just these companies alone have requested almost 3 million foreign workers.”

The move is one of a series of actions meant to protect American white-collar workers, the Post reported. “It begins with universities and companies that have turned into visa mills, promoting foreign workers that have lied about their qualifications to take jobs from our beloved American workers,” Sonderling claimed, per the Post.

The universities are next in the task force’s sights. According to Newsmax’s account of Thursday’s briefing, officials said they plan to separately investigate nine schools over alleged abuse of the J-1 visa program, which brings in foreign nationals as students, researchers and teachers: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, UC Davis, Caltech, MIT and Arizona State. Vance said officials believe schools regularly employ workers from abroad as a way to undercut the salaries they’d otherwise need to pay Americans. It’s the escalation of the crackdown Previously covered Thursday morning.

04 Microsoft Pushes Back

Microsoft did not let the accusations stand. In a statement Thursday, reported by USA Today, the company said the “vast majority” of its U.S.-based employees are American, and pushed back hard on the visa math: of the approximately 6,000 H-1B applications it submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% were to extend or change the status of existing employees rather than to hire new ones.

“The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to come work for us, and they equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce,” the company said. “They are not new arrivals to our country.”

Microsoft added that it only files H-1B petitions for workers who meet “the rigorous standards of this visa category,” that it pays “some of the highest compensation in the tech sector,” that its wages “are among the highest of all H-1B filings,” and that it pays H-1B employees “the same as any other employees doing comparable work,” per the Post’s account of the statement.

The subtext of the targeting wasn’t lost on the Post’s reporters: Microsoft’s president of global affairs is Lisa Monaco, the former deputy attorney general under Joe Biden who oversaw the federal investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents in his first term — a longtime Trump target.

05 The Split Screen

The day’s optics were striking. Hours after Vance accused Microsoft of fraud, President Trump was due to present Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at the White House’s Science: A New Golden Age Summit — the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement. According to the White House, as reported by WJBO Newsradio, Dell CEO Michael Dell was also set to receive the Technology and Innovation medal, while SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su were to receive the National Medal of Science. AFP’s account of the day noted Trump presenting Nadella with “the most prestigious US technology medal” at a ceremony in Washington the same day the suspension was announced.

Vance downplayed the collision: “Our message to Microsoft is not that we want to harm your company, it’s that we want your company to thrive, but we want it to thrive by employing and empowering your fellow Americans. So we’re going to continue to support Microsoft and have a great relationship with Microsoft, but we’re also going to deny them the ability to apply for these permanent residencies until they show that they are going to get serious about putting American workers first,” he said, according to the Post.

The suspension is indefinite, and Vance laid out no specific steps for the companies to regain access — only, as Vance put it, that Microsoft and the others need to “change their behavior, improve their behavior and actually get better,” per the Post. Newsmax’s reporting notes the announcement did not specify how the suspension would affect pending applications or how long it would remain in place. The morning’s crackdown was the opening act; Thursday’s announcement is the escalation.