The Trump administration is suspending Microsoft and Adobe from a federal program that companies use to sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling said Thursday during a press conference.
Vance accused Microsoft of abusing the Permanent Labor Certification Program, or PERM. The program is an initial step that employers generally must complete before sponsoring a worker for an employment-based green card, requiring them to show that no qualified and available US workers could fill the role.
“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 said.
Microsoft filed more certified PERM applications than any other employer in the first three quarters of this fiscal year, with 1504, according to a Business Insider analysis, and an additional 174 were filed for subsidiaries LinkedIn and Activision. Adobe filed 168 in the same time period.
The announcement came just over a week after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sat two seats away from Vance at President Donald Trump’s White House “Super Intelligence” luncheon, a gathering of tech executives focused on AI.
A Microsoft spokesperson pointed Business Insider to a blog post the company published Thursday, which said “the vast majority of Microsoft employees in the United States are Americans.”
Microsoft wrote that roughly 80% of the about 6,000 H-1B visa applications it filed in the last fiscal year were to extend or change the status of existing employees, rather than to hire new people. It said the remaining applications were for people already legally in the US and amounted to 1% of its US workforce.
Adobe did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the administration was also suspending Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL Technologies, and Capgemini from the program. The IT companies are among the largest users of PERM and other employment-based immigration pathways in the US.
Vance also said the administration would investigate nine universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, over allegations that they used J-1 exchange visas to undercut American wages. Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito said subpoenas had already been served.
The announcement is the latest escalation for the administration against companies that rely on highly skilled foreign workers, particularly through the H-1B visa system. Microsoft is one of the biggest employers of H-1B workers in the US.
It was not immediately clear how long the suspension would last or what it would mean for Microsoft employees whose permanent-residency cases are already pending. The process is already slow: The Labor Department says PERM applications took an average of 336 calendar days to process in August.
Correction: October 8, 2026 — An earlier version of this story misstated who announced Adobe’s suspension. It was Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling.
