Vice President JD Vance announced Thursday that the Trump administration is suspending Microsoft’s participation in the federal permanent labor certification program, known as PERM, as officials investigate alleged abuses of employment-based immigration programs.

Vance accused Microsoft of laying off roughly 6,000 American workers last year while benefiting from approximately 6,300 H-1B visas and nearly 3,000 green cards. He argued that the figures raise questions about whether foreign-worker programs are being used to replace American employees, though his remarks did not establish that each visa or green card represented a foreign worker hired to replace a specific laid-off American.

PERM is an employer-sponsored process used in many employment-based green-card applications. Vance said Microsoft will no longer be able to use the process to help H-1B workers obtain permanent residency. The administration did not specify how the suspension will affect pending applications or how long it will last.

“Our message to Microsoft is, you’re a great American company, but you’ve got to hire great American workers,” Vance said. “You cannot lay off American workers and then replace them with foreign indentured servants.” He also criticized foreign outsourcing firms that recruit H-1B workers, claiming they can suppress wages for American employees, though he did not identify the studies supporting the wage figures he cited.

The vice president separately called for scrutiny of nine universities over their use of the J-1 exchange visitor program: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State University and MIT. Vance said the administration believes some universities are relying too heavily on foreign researchers at the expense of American graduate students and researchers. “They’re using these Visas way too much,” he said. “They’re using them to undercut the wages of American grad students and American researchers. And it simply has to stop.”

The announcement follows a broader Labor Department investigation into alleged H-1B and PERM fraud. The department’s inspector general said in July that investigators had uncovered alleged schemes involving fraudulent applications, coerced wage kickbacks and payments below legally required wage levels. The H-1B program allows U.S. employers to hire foreign professionals for specialty occupations, while PERM is one step in the process for obtaining certain employment-based green cards.

Vance urged Congress to reform the H-1B system while pledging that the administration would continue taking action to ensure the program is used as intended and to protect American workers