Vice President JD Vance suspended Microsoft and Adobe from a key green card program Thursday, accusing the tech giant of replacing laid-off Americans with foreign workers.
In a Washington press conference, Vance said the companies are barred from the PERM program, the federal labor certification that lets employers sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency, until they prove they will put American workers first.
The move targets the pathway that turns temporary H-1B visa holders into green-card residents. Vance framed it as a direct response to what he called years of abuse in a system meant only for the hardest-to-fill jobs.
ABC News reported the announcement the same day President Donald Trump awarded Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in Washington.
Vance did not soft-pedal the charge against Microsoft.
He told reporters the H-1B visa is how foreign workers enter the country, and PERM is how they stay.
"Now there has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused the system more than Microsoft."
He walked through the numbers he said defined the problem.
"So, in the last year, Microsoft -- and I want to be clear about the data here, so let me check this -- but Microsoft laid off last year 6,000 American workers. At the same time, the company benefited from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards."
Then he stated the comparison in plain terms.
"In other words, if you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants."
Those figures are Vance’s claims. The primary reporting did not independently verify the exact 12-month window or the underlying government data set behind the layoff, H-1B, and green-card totals.
A related account of Microsoft workforce cuts has cited a lower layoff figure of 4,800 in other coverage, leaving the precise count in dispute across public reports.
Vance said the penalty is not a slap on the wrist.
Microsoft and Adobe lose the ability to apply for permanent residencies through PERM until they show seriousness about American hiring. He said the freeze will “last as long as it needs to,” and that the administration has tools to keep it in place indefinitely if required.
He still described Microsoft as a major American company with an important relationship to the administration.
"Microsoft is a great American company, and we have a great relationship with them. They do a lot of important things. 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."
On the larger program, Vance said H-1B was designed for “the best of the best” in jobs American workers cannot fill. He said it has instead become “rife with fraud” over years, and likely decades.
Microsoft rejected the abuse narrative in a statement to ABC News.
"succeeds as a global technology leader by developing the world’s best technology workforce. We do this by strengthening this country’s talent pipeline, hiring American workers, and attracting the best talent from around the world."
The company said the vast majority of its U.S. employees are Americans, that it files H-1B petitions only for workers who meet the category’s standards, and that it pays H-1B employees the same as comparable staff. It also said its wages rank among the highest in H-1B filings and in the tech sector overall.
Adobe was included in the suspension. ABC News sought comment from Adobe; no response appeared in the reporting.
Hours around the criticism, Trump presented National Medals of Technology and Innovation at the Institute of Peace in Washington during a Golden Age of American Innovation event.
Nadella was among the recipients. Trump praised him as “a key figure in the transformation of Microsoft, revolutionizing the company and empowering businesses, students and consumers from all over the world with some of the most capable software ever built or ever even conceived.”
Other honorees named in the event coverage included Michael Dell of Dell Technologies, Lisa Su of Advanced Micro Devices, Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, and Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google and former president of Alphabet.
The dual track was unmistakable: a public honor for Microsoft’s chief executive, and a concrete bar on the company’s green-card sponsorship channel the same day.
Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department is already looking at firms that favor foreign labor over Americans.
Companies face investigation, Blanche said, if they “discriminate against an American worker in favor of someone on the other side of the world,” conduct he said violates “the trust of the federal government and the American people.”
"The Department of Justice, my department, is actively investigating companies that do this that favor foreign workers over the American people."
Inspector General of Labor Anthony D'Esposito announced a separate “historic investigation into the J-1 visa fraud” tied to nine major universities: Pitt, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Brown, UC Davis, CalTech, Arizona State, and MIT.
D'Esposito said the probes are underway. His warning was blunt about the stakes for research and the law.
"If an American university is breaking the law to save a dollar, while exposing American research to a foreign adversary, that is not academic excellence. It's institutional betrayal."
Vance is leading the administration’s Anti-Fraud Task Force, the role under which Thursday’s PERM action landed.
The reporting did not produce the written order, effective date, or full legal scope of the PERM suspensions. Concrete benchmarks for ending the freeze, beyond Vance’s standard of putting American workers first, were not spelled out.
Nor did the package detail specific PERM filing violations beyond the layoff-versus-visa comparison Vance presented, or show charging documents from the Justice or Labor investigations.
Those gaps matter for process. The policy signal does not.
For years, large tech firms treated H-1B pipelines and green-card sponsorships as routine workforce tools while American employees absorbed round after round of cuts. Thursday’s action ties sponsorship privileges to that record in public, with the country’s second-highest elected official naming the companies and stating the terms.
American workers should not have to compete with a federal pipeline that rewards companies for swapping them out. If Microsoft wants the privilege back, it can show the hiring record that earns it.
