At a White House news conference on October 8, 2026, Vice President JD Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced that Microsoft, Adobe and the consulting firms Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini were suspended from the permanent labor certification program, the step through which employers sponsor foreign workers for green cards. “We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies,” Sonderling said. Fox Business reported that the department cited active federal investigations; no finding of fraud has been made public.
Vance singled out Microsoft: “If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants.” Microsoft said that of roughly 6,000 H-1B applications it filed last fiscal year, 80% were “to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees.” At the same event Vance named nine universities, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford, that he said merited investigation for J-1 visa fraud, and FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson praised EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas for “protecting white American men from discrimination.”