TL;DR: President Donald Trump presented top federal science and technology medals to six tech chief executives on Oct. 8, 2026, hours after Vice President JD Vance said Microsoft would be suspended from a green-card sponsorship program over alleged visa abuse.

Same day, opposite messages for Microsoft

President Donald Trump celebrated technology billionaires for contributions to the United States in Washington on Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026, only hours after Microsoft was accused by his vice president of misusing the immigration system for foreign workers, according to The Associated Press reporting carried by ABC News.

Before the award ceremony recognizing Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella, Vice President JD Vance announced at a news conference that the company was being suspended from a program that lets employers seek green cards for skilled workers holding H-1B visas.

The sequence created an unusually awkward timing for the White House event, because five of the six executives honored by Trump were immigrants.

The White House said the presentations took place at the Science: A New Golden Age Summit, where Trump conferred the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

Trump has described work by the entrepreneurs to accelerate artificial intelligence development as central to his economic agenda, referring to advanced artificial intelligence as super intelligence, and has urged U.S. leadership in its development while opposing additional restraints that he said could slow growth.

Vance suspends Microsoft and Adobe from PERM filings

Vance said Thursday that the administration was suspending Microsoft and Adobe from the PERM program, a labor certification that allows an employer to hire a foreign employee for permanent work in the United States, according to ABC News.

At the news conference in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus, Vance said the H-1B visa was how workers entered the country while PERM was how they remained in the United States.

He said no company in the United States had abused the system more than Microsoft.

Vance, who was asked to lead the administration's Anti-Fraud Task Force, said the H-1B program was intended to let companies bring in the best talent from outside the United States for positions impossible to fill with American workers, but said the program had become rife with fraud over recent years and possibly recent decades.

Attorney General Todd Blanche said at the same announcement that the Department of Justice was actively investigating companies that favored foreign workers over American workers and warned that discrimination against an American worker in favor of a worker from abroad violated the trust of the federal government and the American people.

Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito also said the Labor Department was conducting an investigation into alleged J-1 visa fraud involving nine universities, identifying the schools as Pitt, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Brown, UC Davis, CalTech, Arizona State and MIT.

Vance said the suspension would last as long as needed and said the administration had tools to suspend participation indefinitely if necessary.

Numbers cited against Microsoft

Vance said Microsoft last year laid off 6,000 American workers while benefiting from 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards.

He calculated that the figures amounted to one-and-a-half foreign replacements for every worker laid off.

Vance said the companies advertised positions in the United States before applying to the Labor Department for permission to grant a green card to a foreign worker because of a shortage of American workers.

He alleged that employers placed advertisements in small-town newspapers, claimed no one responded, and then used that lack of response to substitute American workers with what he called foreign indentured servants.

Vance said H-1B workers were effectively indentured because losing a job required leaving the country and because they earned less than Americans in comparable positions.

Vance also said Microsoft employees who were laid off were later replaced by foreign workers earning wages far below the average for American citizens.

Labor data cited by The Associated Press placed Microsoft fifth among U.S. employers in H-1B use based on U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services figures, with Amazon first.

The technology company, based in Redmond, Washington, has 223,000 employees worldwide.

How Microsoft answered the fraud allegation

Microsoft said the vast majority of its employees in the United States were Americans.

The company said it succeeded as a global technology leader by developing a leading technology workforce, strengthening the domestic talent pipeline, hiring American workers and attracting talent from around the world.

Microsoft said the majority of its H-1B visa applications in the last fiscal year were to extend or change the status of existing employees rather than to hire new people.

The company said about 6,000 H-1B applications were filed in the last fiscal year and that 80% involved extensions or changes of status for current staff.

Microsoft said the remaining filings for new employees involved individuals already legally in the United States who chose to join the company and equaled only 1% of its U.S. workforce, not new arrivals to the country.

The company said it filed H-1B petitions only for people who met the rigorous standards of the visa category.

Microsoft said it paid some of the highest compensation in the technology sector, that its wages were among the highest of all H-1B filings, and that H-1B employees received the same pay as other employees doing comparable work.

ABC News said it had contacted Adobe for comment on its inclusion in the suspension.

Trump gives Nadella technology medal

In presenting the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Nadella, Trump offered praise and made no remarks about the company's hiring of foreign workers.

Trump said Nadella had for more than three decades been a key figure in Microsoft's transformation, revolutionizing the company and empowering businesses, students and consumers around the world with highly capable software.

The White House citation for Nadella credited transformative leadership of a critical American technology company, its rejuvenation for cloud computing, and construction of hyperscale infrastructure that enabled training and global deployment of American super intelligence.

Nadella said on social media that he was humbled to stand alongside major figures in American innovation and looked forward to continuing joint work to advance technology and drive American prosperity.

When asked about the apparent contradiction between honoring Nadella and penalizing Microsoft, Vance said the administration would continue to support Microsoft and maintain a strong relationship with the company.

Vance also said Microsoft did many important things but would be denied the ability to apply for the permanent residencies until it demonstrated serious commitment to placing American workers first.

He summarized the administration's position as viewing Microsoft as a great American company that needed to hire great American workers, adding that employers could not lay off American workers and replace them with foreign indentured servants.

Six billionaires receive nation's top science honors

Trump awarded the National Medal of Science to SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang and Advanced Micro Devices Chief Executive Lisa Su.

He awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Nadella and Dell Technologies Chief Executive Michael Dell.

Each of the four science medalists was born outside the United States: Musk in South Africa, Brin in Russia, and Huang and Su in Taiwan.

Nadella immigrated from India, while Dell was born in Texas, meaning five of the six recipients came from abroad.

Dell has supported the government's special investment accounts for children known as Trump Accounts.

The White House said the National Medal of Science had been awarded by presidents since 1963 for outstanding contributions to science in service of the United States, while the National Medal of Technology and Innovation had recognized American innovators since its first award in 1985.

The White House citations credited Musk for engineering achievements in space exploration, intelligent systems and communications; Brin for foundational information-retrieval and data-processing algorithms; Huang for developing the graphics processing unit into a general-purpose computing architecture; and Su for semiconductor engineering and chiplet-based integration that powered the first exascale supercomputer.

The citation for Dell credited promotion of personal and enterprise computing, technical and business management in building a worldwide technology company, and support for future scientists, engineers and technologists.

Michael Kratsios, assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said each medalist had transformed an industry and established foundations for widely used technologies.

Golden Age summit and recent White House visits

The honors were part of a summit celebrating a new golden age of science, building on a July 2026 report titled Science: A New Golden Age, according to the White House.

The White House said the report was the first comprehensive rethinking of the U.S. science and technology enterprise since Vannevar Bush's 1945 report Science: The Endless Frontier.

The White House said the report addressed industry's expanded role in research and development, closer integration of applied and foundational research, support for early-career scientists, ambitious scientific missions, new funding models and scaling science through the Genesis Mission.

The summit convened scientists and innovators to translate those recommendations into future scientific work, with additional administration announcements planned with private-sector and research partners.

Trump called the recipients national treasures and compared them with his uncle, John Trump, an electrical engineer and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who received the National Medal of Science in 1983.

Trump told the audience it was a major day in science and technology and said the recipients would enter history as great figures.

He joked to attendees that the gathering represented an extremely high-IQ audience.

The Associated Press noted that past winners of the National Medal of Science, established in 1959, had mostly been academics and research scientists rather than business leaders, and that the business-leader ceremony coincided with the separate awarding of Nobel Prizes that week.

Musk, Huang and Su sat at the head table with Trump at the state dinner for Chinese leader Xi Jinping, while Brin, Nadella and Dell also attended.

Dell visited the Oval Office on Wednesday to discuss Trump Accounts.

Huang and Musk were among technology leaders at the White House the prior week to sign a voluntary agreement on AI development after recent models raised national security and safety concerns.

Sources referenced