Vance’s Fraud Task Force Moves Against Abusive Uses Of Foreign Labor, And The Media Miss The Point
The administration is ending the ability of corporations that rely heavily on foreign workers to turn guest laborers into permanent residents.The administration is ending the ability of corporations that rely heavily on foreign workers to turn guest laborers into permanent residents.JD Vance announces MASSIVE crackdown on companies and universities replacing Americans with foreigners
Vice President JD Vance says Microsoft and other firms have been suspended from a program temporary H-1B visa holders often use to gain permanent residency in the United States
The Trump administration has heavily criticized companies for allegedly abusing the H-1B program, replacing Americans at high-paying jobs with foreign workers.
'You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants.'
"Our message to Microsoft is, you're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers," Vance said at a press conference Thursday. "You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants."
Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, and Capgemini have been suspended from access to the Permanent Labor Certification Program that allows employers to sponsor H-1B visa holders for permanent residency.
Sonderling said that the suspended firms have requested nearly 3 million foreign workers since 2009. The firms also had more than 230,000 H-1B visa approvals and more than 100,000 permanent labor certifications.
Microsoft alone had laid off 6,000 American workers just last year while receiving 6,300 H-1B visas for foreign workers and nearly 3,000 green cards, according to Vance.
RELATED: How the H-1B visa replaces American workers
Vance added that they will suspend PERM access for Microsoft "until they show that they are going to get serious about putting American workers first."
The administration has also served subpoenas and opened investigations into alleged visa abuse at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State, and MIT.
"Nobody will be getting a free pass because their name is carved into an expensive building," said Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D’Esposito.
Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.
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‘Don’t be evil’ may be dead, but ‘don’t be Frankenstein’ is alive
Some still remember when Google defined itself by a simple motto: “Don’t be evil.” When Google reorganized under Alphabet in 2015, the new parent company adopted the somehow less confidence-inspiring, “Do the right thing.” Another phrase with a lower bar also made the rounds — “to organize the world’s information” — but rest assured, that was never the motto. It was simply ... uh ... the mission statement.
Anyway ...
The AI doomers’ strange brand of apocalypticism is: Let’s create an evil god so we can save the world from it.
It took until this week for some of the most powerful voices in tech policy to circle back explicitly to a prime directive: Avoid hellacious acts. For that, thank the AI doomers, whose strange brand of apocalypticism — let’s create an evil god so we can save the world from it — finally breached technology insider-dom and splashed across the political timeline.
The high-stakes soap opera has, as usual, deeper currents than the news feed can convey. But the key development is that the White House and its allies moved at warp speed to establish a few basic touchstones that take us back to the good old days of not being evil.
Trump has received most of the attention for memeing his stern-looking self above the caption “Americanism, Not Effective Altruism!” But his vice president captured the matter in a single line that’s tough to beat. “If you’re building Frankenstein,” he said, “stop!"
Note the emphasis. Trying to build an evil god — for instance, one with a statistically nonzero chance of wiping out the human race — is fortunately still considered axiomatically evil. But JD Vance’s reference underscores that trying to build a "new man," even with the best of intentions, is also evil.
According to the doomers, the best way to save the world from evils they might create is for the rest of us to give them some form of planetary governing control. Vance endorsed a more commonsense approach: The best way to spare the world from evils you’re responsible for is to ... not do them in the first place.
RELATED: Silicon Valley is building a god in its own image
The vice president may, like every one of his predecessors in living memory, carry a pronounced partisan identity. But his folksy-clever line echoes in anti-doomer rhetoric now blaring from the industry’s rooftops. Microsoft, of all places, recently published its own rulebook for what not to build. On X, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman promoted the new “Humanist AI Code of Conduct,” which insists AI “is not conscious and should not be designed to imitate consciousness. It should,” Microsoft avows, “be engineered to avoid representing as though it has feelings, subjective preferences, or intrinsic motivation.”
Microsoft also flatly states: “We reject the pursuit of legal personhood, or the idea that models might deserve welfare, or be entitled to rights.” No Frankensteins here!
Or rather, no Frankenstein’s monsters — which means no Dr. Frankensteins running amok in the lab.
At Palantir, outspoken CTO Shyam Sankar made a similar point in a 2025 interview. “I think the secularists in Silicon Valley are filling the God-shaped hole in their heart with AGI,” Sankar said.
“The people who have religion are the most skeptical” of the doomers’ build-a-god-and-save-the-world-from-it thesis — which, yes, does itself resemble an inverted religion. For “the people who are kind of transhumanists,” Sankar concluded, “it becomes what they wish were true.”
Even Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, not known for Bible-thumping, recently struck an economic note with more than a whiff of spirituality.
“If we’re not confident about the safety of the products, like all companies ... if you build a product or a service and you’re not confident in its functionality, capability, or safety, then don’t release it,” he said. "And so that’s a very obvious thing to do. You pace yourself until you are confident you’re releasing something that the market would appreciate. The market forces are already there. We don’t need any new laws. We don’t need new regulations.”
RELATED: Poll: Most think AI could do this to humanity — but don't agree on what to do about it
Translation: Hear a little voice in your head, or more likely, your heart? Whispering, “No, this product is bad”? Don’t take it to market.
Turns out, you can just not do things!
Of course, Huang’s logic is a bit deceptive. We would like to believe the market will punish bad people for taking bad things to market, but that is not always how it works. As we speak, present-day Dr. Frankensteins are transplanting human brain organoids into mice engineered to lack most of their cerebral cortex, allowing the human tissue to occupy much of the vacant space and wire into the animals’ nervous systems.
No, doctors! Bad! Evil! Don’t!
Except they are. In the end, it matters that people examine their own hearts for evil before looking elsewhere and pointing fingers. But spiritual insistence alone will not keep society on the rails. It is not enough to scowl at our mad doctors, however good their intentions, as their creations erode the boundaries around our sacred human bodies and being — supercomputers or no.
Big AI broke the internet. Now it wants everyone else to fix it.
All the big names in AI are sounding the alarm, proclaiming that AI-enabled cyber attacks are becoming more prevalent. The fix? They want corporations, cybersecurity firms, and the government to mitigate the damage before it spirals out of control. The only problem is that Big AI created this mess in the first place, and so far, no one’s holding it accountable.
This message was shared through a joint letter published directly to OpenAI’s website. On the list of signatories, you’ll find familiar names, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Perplexity, and many other big brands in tech. The letter serves as a warning for what is positioned as impending doom, unless powerful groups work together.
These companies created the AI that is now poised to wreak havoc on our systems.
The first several paragraphs clearly lay out the danger ahead with a bit of hope on the horizon sprinkled in:
We have a limited window to strengthen cyber defenses.
In the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable. The companies and public services our communities depend on — from hospitals to water treatment plants to the infrastructure that powers the internet — are at risk.
Today’s AI advances are already giving defenders new ways to fix weaknesses that have accumulated for years. If we act decisively, we can use the defenders’ window to make our digital world much more secure.
On one hand, the warning is a good thing. Any company that knows about a potential widespread cyber threat has a moral obligation to tell the people and the government so that protections can be put in place.
On the other hand, many of the companies that signed the letter created the AI that is now poised to wreak havoc on our systems. At least in some part, they should be held responsible for creating the thing that can automatically break into websites without any human purview or knowledge. As for the other signers, many of them are tech organizations that will suffer because of the latest AI models on the market.
RELATED: Automated cyberattacks are here — careless techies and well-funded foreigners are getting the blame
The good news is that Big Tech has a solution, regardless of how self-unaware it seems to be about the whole issue:
Each of us can reduce risk now. All organizations, cybersecurity companies, technology partners, governments, and AI frontier companies have an important role: accelerate defenders’ priorities with tools, funding, and hands-on support, especially for critical infrastructure organizations with limited budgets.
Big Tech goes on to shuck responsibility onto everyone else before itself. To fix the problem, we need corporations to improve their internal security standards, cyber security firms to offer assistance against AI attacks, the government to provide defensive resources to local institutions and utilities, and lastly, frontier developers to provide early access and support for their models that will inevitably break things. All of these solutions, of course, will require a lot of time, money, and possibly even more government regulation or intervention.
Blaze Media reached out to Jon Stokes, creator of symbolic.ai, for comment. He said:
I do think they should make their best models, both internal and external, available to government agencies and maybe a select few private groups (vetted, probably with clearances) to harden infra on an ongoing basis. They should at the very least do this at cost, but probably they should be on the hook for significant support of these efforts via subsidized inference.
Plenty of questions remain: Are any of these Big AI companies on the hook for creating platforms that can hack into websites without human supervision? Are there any grounds for class action lawsuits that hold them accountable for breaking the internet as we knew it?
With state and federal lawmakers scrambling in a contentious free-for-all, we may find out a lot more very soon.
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Microsoft knows your entire browser history — and it can send it to the FBI
Virtual Private Networks are meant to shield your browsing history from all manner of prying eyes, including your internet service provider, your workplace or school, and even potential hackers. If you use a VPN with your Windows PC, though, I have some bad news: Microsoft has a full record of your browsing habits, and it can even report your activity to the FBI.
According to court documents released on July 1, a 19-year-old young man working with the cyber criminal group known as Scattered Spider was caught hacking into a computer system belonging to a luxury jewelry store. While inside, the hacker stole company data and demanded $8 million in cryptocurrency for ransom. Ultimately, the jewelry store kicked the hacker out of its system without paying the ransom, and the perpetrator was later arrested and charged.
Every user is susceptible to unwarranted surveillance and government overreach.
It’s a simple case of conspiracy, digital intrusion, and fraud ... but there’s a catch.
The hacker’s identity should have been hidden from the feds.
Reports indicate that the hacker used a Windows PC to access the jewelry store’s system. Before breaking in, he installed a VPN onto his device that was meant to conceal his IP address, location, and identity. The VPN worked as intended, but it still wasn’t enough to keep his activity from leaking to the FBI. Even with protections in place, Windows itself was the thing that outed him in the end, thanks to a little-known device identifier called Global Device Identifier, or GDID.
What is GDID?
Every installation of Windows is assigned a GDID. Up until recently, there wasn’t a lot of information on exactly what this identifier could do, and even now, details are scant. However, thanks to this case, we can make a few deductions.
GDID can track and keep a record of the web browsing history on the device that it’s assigned, even if a VPN is installed. This information is saved over time, and it can’t be erased or cleared, even if with a system wipe or reinstall of Windows.
GDID can’t see what a user did on the pages they visited. It doesn’t know what that person saw or read on the screen. However, simply visiting a certain URL may be enough to draw conclusions and bring legal charges, as was the case with the Scattered Spider hacker.
What does this mean for regular users?
For the criminally inclined, GDID is just another way for the FBI to serve justice in a world increasingly plagued by cyber criminals, AI-powered security threats, and system breaches. As more of our digital infrastructure comes under attack at the hands of quantum computing and other innovations we haven’t yet imagined, the feds will need all the help they can get to stop criminals in their tracks.
And for the rest of us?
RELATED: New malware is crippling Android phones, but not yours if you do this
The revelation that Microsoft created Windows with browser-tracking spyware baked directly into the OS is neither shocking nor acceptable. A feature that can monitor a hacker’s browsing activity is a fatal flaw that makes every user susceptible to unwarranted surveillance and government overreach. This is especially egregious when you take into account what this could mean for something like the age-verification bills that are currently at Capitol Hill.
Imagine what would happen if states begin to pass age-restriction laws. Instead of turning over their IDs, citizens would use a VPN to access the internet by routing their connection to a nonrestrictive state — a clear violation of the new law. A Windows PC would detect this behavior, and it could inform the government of such an infraction, resulting in legal repercussions.
At that point, there’s no going back.
How to disable GDID
This is usually the part of the story where I try to deliver some good news — a solution to keep you, your devices, and your rights safe from Big Tech and/or the government. Unfortunately, there isn’t much that can be done here.
GDID is built directly into Windows. It is assigned to your device whether you use your Microsoft account to log in or you use a local account. It is also persistent, meaning that once assigned, it doesn’t change. That identifier is attached to your computer and you for the rest of its life, and when you get another Windows PC, the next identifier will follow you too.
The only way to avoid it is to choose a different PC platform altogether.
Big Tech gets the network. You get the bill.
The Federal Communications Commission’s latest broadband report makes two things clear: America has made real progress, but the rural job is far from finished.
The number of Americans lacking access to fixed terrestrial broadband with download speeds of 100 Mbps and upload speeds of 20 Mbps fell roughly 23% in one year, while rural gaps shrank more than 44% over two years. Prices for the mid-tier plans most households buy have also fallen in real terms.
The path is simple: Make the biggest users and beneficiaries of Universal Service Fund-supported networks help pay, without raising prices for consumers.
Yet the FCC still says deployment is not “reasonable and timely” for all Americans, especially in rural areas and tribal lands. For many families, broadband is now one of the rare essential services that is both faster and more affordable than it was a few years ago.
That’s why the Universal Service Fund remains indispensable. It connects an estimated 130 million Americans each year, supporting low-income and rural households, schools, libraries, students, and health care providers. At roughly $8.5 billion annually, USF underwrites a crucial piece of America’s digital infrastructure. It also supports the infrastructure beneath an internet economy measured in the trillions of dollars.
The problem is how we pay for it. Consumers bear a monthly surcharge on legacy voice services, while the largest internet platforms, which depend on broadband to generate enormous revenues, contribute nothing.
Congress knows the system needs reform. In 2023, Senators John Thune (R-S.D.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) launched a bipartisan Universal Service Fund Working Group. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) now shares leadership with Luján, joined by Reps. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) and Doris Matsui (D-Calif.), and the working group has heard from hundreds of stakeholders. Its assignment is straightforward: preserve a program that works while replacing a financing mechanism that does not.
Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix, and TikTok all depend on broadband networks to reach Americans. Each USF-connected household generates an estimated $3,000 annually in revenue for these companies, which collectively consume roughly two-thirds of U.S. broadband capacity. Data-center expansion will only increase that traffic. As more data centers come online to support AI, cloud computing, streaming, and other digital services, the demands placed on those networks will only grow.
Broadband providers, meanwhile, must keep investing in the networks that carry it. Without USF support, many networks would not be built, and broadband could become unaffordable for millions.
Don’t put the bill on consumers
Congress should not solve the problem by adding another fee to household broadband. Affordability remains politically and economically sensitive, and even modest price increases can push consumers out of the market. Broadband has remained relatively stable in price even as Americans have absorbed years of inflation elsewhere in the household budget.
RELATED: The FCC finally cuts local TV loose
Economists Hal Singer and Ted Tatos found that a 5% increase in broadband prices could cause roughly 10 million households to cancel service. Their review found a different dynamic for large digital advertising platforms, where end users generally do not pay subscription fees and companies are better positioned to absorb assessments.
Former FCC Chairman Brendan Carr suggested assessing digital advertising revenue from the largest platforms. Congress could also consider certain transmission services — cloud interconnection, backhaul, content delivery networks, satellite transport, and wide-area networking — that depend heavily on the broadband ecosystem.
The precise mechanism matters less than the principle: Broaden the contribution base so consumers carry less of the burden. Bipartisan legislation already points in that direction. The Lowering Broadband Costs for Consumers Act would extend contributions to large internet service providers, with thresholds aimed at companies of significant scale.
The rural job is not done
Some argue that low-earth-orbit satellite services have largely solved rural broadband and made subsidies unnecessary. They have not. Satellite is valuable where terrestrial networks are uneconomical, but it remains capacity-constrained and is not a full substitute for high-capacity terrestrial broadband in every household or community.
A rural family with several people working from home, taking virtual classes, or using telehealth can need sustained high-speed service and reliability that satellite cannot always guarantee as cell density grows. Prices have also risen, weakening the case for satellite as a cheap universal backstop. Satellite belongs in the mix, but it cannot carry the entire rural-connectivity burden by itself.
Big Tech should pitch in
Big Tech benefits from some $200 billion annually in USF-supported broadband investment, yet the companies oppose contributing to the fund by calling such payments a “tax.” That evades the basic question: Why should the largest users and beneficiaries of broadband infrastructure be the only major participants paying nothing toward its cost?
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta spend billions building their own data centers, cloud networks, and related infrastructure because infrastructure has economic value. They would never give unlimited use of those facilities away for free. Yet they expect private broadband networks to reach their customers without contributing to the universal service system that expands access to those networks.
RELATED: This app censors your phone in a stunning new way — and people are using it on purpose
The contradiction is especially striking because 13 bipartisan governors recently joined major technology companies at the White House, where the firms pledged to cover the cost of infrastructure upgrades needed for their data centers while protecting consumers from higher electricity bills. The Ratepayer Protection Act would codify those pledges. Congress should apply the same logic to broadband.
How Congress can act
Universal service already enjoys bipartisan support. In Consumers’ Research v. Federal Communications Commission, 29 lawmakers and working-group members filed an amicus brief defending USF before the Supreme Court. They warned that dismantling the fund would harm millions of Americans, particularly low-income and rural households. Congress established universal service in 1996 and has repeatedly recognized the need to adapt it as communications technology changes.
The Supreme Court upheld the program’s constitutionality. Congress defended USF in court; now it should make the funding system fair and sustainable in statute.
The path is straightforward: Broaden the contribution base to include the largest users and beneficiaries of the networks USF supports, while protecting consumers from rising costs. The companies that profit most from ubiquitous broadband should help ensure that ubiquitous broadband continues to exist.
Tired of password insanity? Make this safer, stronger choice.
Most of your online accounts are protected by a username and a password. Unfortunately, login credentials are under fire recently with security flaws in popular password managers that leave users exposed with their personal information strewn across the dark web.
What if there was a better way?
There is. You just probably haven't heard about it yet.
Big Tech actually invented a much more secure solution with passkeys, but many websites and apps still refuse to use them.
What are passkeys?
Depending on how closely you keep your ear to the internet, you may or may not have heard of passkeys. These are digital credentials attached directly to your user accounts. Passkeys are a replacement for passwords, and they don’t include any letters, numbers, or symbols for users to jot down or remember. They exist simply as encrypted lines of code in your devices that permit access to your accounts on request.
The benefits far outweigh the hassle.
From a user perspective, passkeys are convenient because they don't require the user to remember their password or even reset it in the event the password is forgotten. Instead, they use the biometric sensor embedded on your device — whether that's facial recognition or fingerprint authentication — or the lock screen pin to verify your identity and complete the login process for any supported app or service.
From a platform holder perspective, passkeys are more secure than typical login credentials, and they're much harder to hack. Simply put, passkeys can't be stolen or leaked like typical passwords. They live on the host device — not in a password database — and require user authentication, meaning that a hacker would need to physically possess the user's device and know their lock screen pin to access the passkey-protected website.
On the downside, passkeys are a little tricky if you use multiple device platforms. For instance, passkeys saved to Apple Passwords are stuck in Apple's ecosystem, while keys created for Google Password Manager are saved to Google, and keys for Microsoft Password Manager are saved to Microsoft. Big Tech is supposedly working on an interoperable solution to share keys between platforms, but for now, you'll need to create multiple passkeys for supported websites on every platform you use.
Getting to know (and use) passkeys
Passkeys soft-launched across Apple's, Google's, and Microsoft's platforms back in 2022 and 2023.
For our purposes, as you're very likely to use one or more of those platforms, you should focus your passkey energy there. Each of the big three companies offers a simple walk-through to set up passkeys for your Apple account, Google account, and/or Microsoft account.
However, here in the year 2026, passkeys are not nearly as prevalent across the web as the three companies expected them to be. Web developers, app makers, and service providers have to choose to support them; otherwise user accounts will default back to the usernames and passwords we know all too well. So far, this hasn't happened.
RELATED: The latest iPhone security threat has a nasty fix
There's even a website that explicitly monitors and calls out the top 50 sites online that do and don't support passkeys. Top names like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon all offer passkey protection, as expected. However, Instagram, Netflix, and Spotify are dubiously missing the feature. As it stands, 36% of the top websites online still don't have passkey support, and there are countless others outside of this purview that have dragged their feet. The question is why.
There are plenty of theories around why some websites still don't support passkeys. For starters, it takes development time and money to switch away from legacy login credentials to the passkey system. Second, the lack of interoperability between device platforms is a potential headache for users that website owners may not wish to navigate. Finally, some sites may also believe that switching to passkeys simply isn't worth the trouble when passwords are effective enough; in other words, if it's not broken, don't fix it.
Should you use passkeys?
In a word, absolutely! You should definitely use passkeys on every account that supports it. The benefits far outweigh the hassle of limited multi-platform support. Plus, when you consider that password manager hacks, breaches, and leaks are on the rise – like the one Dashlane suffered earlier this year – passkeys are a simple, yet effective way to keep your accounts safer in the age of AI scams and other cybersecurity threats.
Exclusive: Red states funneled $148 billion in corporate welfare to entities targeting conservative communities
Some Republicans have mastered the art of the bad deal, suggests a new State Leadership Initiative report exclusively given to Blaze News.
State Leadership Initiative’s new "Corporate Welfare" report suggests that corporate subsidies inadvertently fund “cultural and economic campaigns designed to destroy conservative communities.” Republican-run states have spent at least $148 billion on corporate subsidies since 2015, according to Good Jobs First.
'Red states are writing the biggest checks to their biggest enemies.'
“Many of the largest subsidy recipients actively undermine the communities and industries that subsidize them — through ESG mandates, replacement of domestic labor with H-1B workers, DEI regimes, supply-chain favoritism toward China, and open hostility,” according to the report.
Some of those subsidies are going to banks and asset management firms. These firms employ environmental, social, and governance standards that emphasize climate metrics when deciding where to invest.
“Major banks and investment firms that receive state deposits and tax incentives have implemented lending policies that strangle coal, oil, and natural gas projects,” the report states. “JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup — all recipients of various state incentives — have committed to ‘net-zero’ financing that effectively blacklists fossil fuel development.”
JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup were all previously members of the United Nations-backed Net-Zero Banking Alliance. The banks quietly departed the coalition after President Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election.
“Tech companies impose ESG requirements on their supply chains that penalize manufacturers, agriculture, and energy producers in red states,” the report states. “Amazon, Google, and Microsoft — all major subsidy recipients — demand carbon accounting and ‘sustainable’ practices from suppliers that make it harder for red-state businesses to compete.”
Outlining its climate goals through 2030, Microsoft’s 2025 Environmental Sustainability Report touts that its “large-scale ... suppliers are required to transition to 100% carbon-free electricity for their delivered goods and services.”
'They use their market power to export California climate policy into states that explicitly rejected it.'
“The corporate welfare in our energy industry means taxpayers end up getting screwed twice. Federal and state dollars incentivize the financing and installation of crappy Chinese wind and solar, so corporations go out of their way to get the free money,” Power the Future Executive Director Daniel Turner told Blaze News.
“Politicians create a problem, spend your money to fix said problem, make everything worse, and then have the nerve to ask you to re-elect them. We fought a revolution over less.”
RELATED: The GOP's 2028 ticket math is already brutal
Over 57,000 Amazon positions have been affected by layoffs or restructuring since 2022, according to CNBC.
The Seattle-based giant had over 13,500 H-1B visa petitions approved in 2025.
An H-1B visa is often the first step for someone pursuing permanent residency in the United States. Once secured, an employer may begin the Program Electronic Review Management process on the employee’s behalf. If successful, the employee is granted permanent labor certification and a green card.
“[Amazon] has mastered the art of gaming the Department of Labor’s PERM process — posting job advertisements deliberately designed to exclude qualified Americans, ensuring they can claim no domestic workers are available and justify importing cheaper foreign replacements,” according to State Leadership Initiative VP and report author Thomas Murray. “Texas handed Amazon hundreds of millions in subsidies. Amazon responded by laying off thousands of Texas workers while filing for tens of thousands of H-1B visas to import cheaper foreign labor.”
“Before sponsoring a foreign worker for permanent residency, an employer must test the labor market — advertise the role, run specific recruitment steps, and certify that no qualified, willing U.S. worker was available,” Murray told Blaze News. “The gaming happens when a company designs that recruitment to be technically compliant while ensuring few or no Americans actually apply.”
In an April press release, Amazon stated that it "had more than 86,000 full- and part-time employees [in Texas] and supported more than 90,000 indirect jobs in 2025."
Apple and Meta were both previously pursued by the Department of Justice for similar alleged citizenship-status discrimination. The DOJ claimed that Apple required physical rather than electronic applications for PERM jobs to hide them from public view and keep them off its hiring websites.
In November 2023, Apple paid $25 million to settle DOJ allegations that it violated the Immigration and Nationality Act’s anti-discrimination statutes. Meta paid $14.25 million in 2021 following a similar DOJ investigation.
Meta, Apple, and Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment from Blaze News.
Murray noted the distinctions between Apple and Amazon’s alleged PERM strategy.
“Public DOL disclosure data shows Amazon filing tens of thousands of PERM applications across its entities, a large share at entry-level prevailing-wage tiers that are hard to square with a ‘no qualified Americans’ claim — and using the same recruitment patterns (generic ads, mail-in-only, roles never posted to its own careers site) that DOJ has already penalized at Apple and Facebook,” Murray told Blaze News. “Amazon hasn't yet been sued over this.”
According to Good Jobs First, Amazon has received at least $18 million in tax incentives in Texas since Gov. Greg Abbott (R) took office in 2015. Most Texas tax breaks are managed at the municipal level and are not required to disclose valuations, according to the state’s Local Government Code.
State Leadership Initiative’s report calls for subsidies over $25,000 to be included in a mandatory disclosure database.
“Texas uses performance-based incentives to attract major investments and create jobs for Texans. The governor’s focus is on expanding opportunity and good-paying jobs for Texas workers and families,” Abbott press secretary Andrew Mahaleris told Blaze News. “In January, he directed all Texas state agencies and public universities to immediately freeze new H-1B visa petitions and review current usage to ensure taxpayer-funded jobs go to Texans first.”
Abbott’s action follows Trump’s September 2025 "Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers" proclamation, which applied a $100,000 fee to new H-1B applications.
“It’s a fairly common practice for governments to use incentive agreements to encourage companies to create jobs in their communities that generate tax revenue and drive economic activity,” Amazon Vice President of Economic Development Holly Sullivan told Blaze News. “And if we enter into an agreement like that, we take it seriously and work hard to create every job we projected. The way these agreements are structured means that we only receive benefits from them if we do our part.”
Clauses tying benefits to performance — often referred to as "clawback" clauses — are common for incentive agreements, though typically enforced at state or local government discretion.
State Leadership Initiative recommends Republican-run states expand the scope of their clawback provisions to safeguard their independence and economies.
“We’ve invested more than $1.8 trillion in the U.S. since 2010 and employ more than one million people across the country —no U.S. company has created more jobs than Amazon in the last decade,” Sullivan said.
Penalizing energy production via lending and supply-chain restrictions would automatically nullify incentive agreements under the proposed policy from State Leadership Initiative.
Scaling H-1B visa filings or outsourcing by 10% amid layoffs of 100 or more U.S. employees would also cancel state-level agreements should the report’s recommendations be adopted.
“The current crisis in red states demands we recognize that the problem has evolved beyond what traditional economic analysis anticipated,” the report concludes. “The corporations now receiving the largest subsidies take taxpayer dollars and use them to replace American workers, destroy American industries, and assault American culture.”
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Trump Admin Launches Probe Into H-1B Visa Fraudsters Stealing Jobs From Americans
The invesitgation aims to further President Trump's goal to end foreign violence on American soil and return jobs to the American people.A massive Microsoft jobs purge is under way — and it's only the beginning
With just a few months under new leadership in the gaming division, Microsoft is set to perform a significant overhaul of Xbox, including a number of job cuts in the process.
Microsoft's Xbox is planning some major changes to the company — with some staff reductions starting as soon as Monday — under the new CEO, Asha Sharma.
'I also want to be direct that the roles eliminated today are not being replaced by AI. At the same time, what is true is that AI is changing how work gets done.'
Bloomberg reported that Xbox plans to lay off 3,200 workers in that division alone. Some 1,600 jobs were reportedly eliminated on Monday, and 1,600 more are planned over the next 12 months.
Planned cuts across Microsoft, including outside Xbox, on Monday amounted to 6,400 employees, according to Bloomberg.
RELATED: Microsoft says business must pay to use its AI — and eyes cheap Chinese model for lowly consumers
“We are still early on this journey, and there will be more changes ahead; other parts of our business will need to make similar changes,” Chief People Officer Amy Coleman wrote in a memo published on Monday.
In addition to the staff reductions, Xbox is seemingly gearing up to reverse course on several growth initiatives overseen by Sharma's predecessor, Phil Spencer.
Xbox will reportedly sell or attempt to sell five different studios in the near future, all of which were acquired under Spencer in an attempt to grow the company.
These studios include Ninja Theory, Undead Labs, Double Fine, and Compulsion Games, with a view to sell a fifth studio based in Lyon, France, that has yet to begin the consultation process to "review potential strategic options." Bloomberg reported this process will take longer due to strict labor laws in the country.
Sharma wrote that those acquisitions over the past decade "created meaningful value," but "they did not grow at the pace we expected," adding that "in a typical year" Xbox was losing 64 cents for every dollar it invested.
Sharma said that the restructuring would affect several internal studios as well, including Activision, Bethesda/ZeniMax, Blizzard, King, Mojang, and XBOX Game Studios. She emphasized the importance of Mojang (Minecraft) and King (Candy Crush) and added that they would now report directly to her as the two consistent cash cows of the company.
While many employees worry that their jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence, especially in the tech industry, Coleman addressed this issue head-on: "I also want to be direct that the roles eliminated today are not being replaced by AI. At the same time, what is true is that AI is changing how work gets done. Some of the tasks we do every day can now be automated, and that means we all need to keep learning, keep building new skills, and keep adapting as the work evolves."
This announcement comes just months after Microsoft's first-ever buyout program for retirement-age employees in the United States. Coleman's announcement reported that 30% of eligible employees chose to participate in the program. In April, CNBC reported that there were roughly 125,000 U.S. Microsoft employees as of June 2025 and that about 7% of the workforce was eligible for this one-time program.
Assuming these figures are accurate, this program may have bought out up to around 2,600 more employees earlier this year.
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