Vance Suspends Microsoft's PERM Filings After a Probe Tied 6,000 Layoffs to 6,300 H-1B Hires

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Thursday barred Microsoft from filing new or pending applications to sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency, and Vice President JD Vance said the company had abused the program more than any other in the country.

The suspension covers the Labor Department's PERM process, the step that lets an employer seek a green card for a worker already in the United States, often on an H-1B visa. Adobe and major information-technology outsourcers, including Infosys, were suspended as well. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the department "will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies." Microsoft did not immediately comment.

Vance, who chairs an anti-fraud task force, said the probe found Microsoft laid off roughly 6,000 American workers last year while employing 6,300 non-citizens it had brought in on H-1B visas. "The H-1B visa is how the people get into the United States in the first place, and then a PERM program is how those employees stay," he said. "There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused the system more than Microsoft."

He described the alleged violation as a false representation, not a paperwork error. "The fraud is that they're making representations when applying for this program that are fundamentally illegitimate and therefore ultimately illegal," he said. At a press conference he added, "Our message to Microsoft is, you're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers. You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants." He said the arithmetic was one and a half foreign hires for each layoff. "If you do the math, for every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one-and-a-half foreign indentured servants."

Sonderling said that since 2009, Microsoft and Adobe together had received about 230,000 H-1B approvals and about 100,000 permanent labor certifications. Microsoft is the largest filer of PERM applications in Labor Department disclosure data compiled by Permtrack. The suspensions do not, on the statements issued Thursday, revoke visas already issued. They stop the green-card step.

The move sits on a wider crackdown. In September 2025 the department opened "Project Firewall," which has opened about 200 cases and levied millions of dollars in penalties, after a White House proclamation put a one-time $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions for workers hired from abroad. Vance also said nine universities, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford, would be investigated over the use of exchange-visitor visas. The administration has at the same time courted the same technology executives whose companies are now named.

PERM requires an employer to attest that it tried to hire a qualified U.S. worker and could not. The department's case is that those attestations were not real when the same firm was cutting thousands of domestic jobs. That is an allegation. No criminal charge was announced Thursday. The bar is administrative and indefinite. A company that wants the certifications processed again will have to deal with a department that has already said it will not take the filings.