Vice President JD Vance announced dozens of federal subpoenas targeting companies accused of abusing the H-1B visa system, part of the administration's expanding War on Fraud task force.
Vice President JD Vance stood in Milwaukee on Wednesday and told Wisconsin voters the Labor Department has opened a fraud investigation into the H-1B visa program, with subpoenas already going out to companies and labor brokers accused of gaming the system at the expense of American workers. "American jobs ought to go to American workers," Vance said, framing the probe as the latest front in the administration's War on Fraud, the taxpayer-protection initiative he has led since Trump put him in charge of it earlier this year.
The visit doubled as a stop on Vance's fraud-enforcement tour through battleground states, following earlier action in Minnesota over Medicaid billing. This time the target was the H-1B program, the visa category tech and consulting firms use to bring in foreign workers for specialized jobs. Vance said big corporations and offshore staffing firms have been undercutting American wages by exploiting the very visa rules meant to protect them.
The Labor Department's Office of Inspector General, under Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito, said the dozens of subpoenas target employers and labor brokers suspected of submitting fraudulent Labor Condition Applications, the certified filings that require employers to pay H-1B workers the prevailing wage for their role. Investigators allege some firms instead ran wage-kickback schemes, paying visa holders below the certified rate and pocketing the difference, while flooding the labor market with workers willing to accept less than an American employee would.
D'Esposito told Fox Business that whistleblowers have named some of the biggest names in the industry, including Cognizant, the India-based IT outsourcing giant that employs tens of thousands of H-1B workers in the United States. No charges have been filed against Cognizant, and the Labor Department has not confirmed the company is a formal subject of the investigation. A spokesperson for Cognizant did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the allegations.
Vance himself declined to name specific companies or individuals under investigation during his Milwaukee remarks, leaving the details to the Inspector General's office. That restraint matters. The administration is moving on subpoena power, not indictments, and the difference between a company facing scrutiny and a company facing charges is not small.
Part of a bigger enforcement push
This is not Vance's first stop on the fraud circuit. He has already suspended Medicaid payments to Minnesota over billing irregularities and referred Governor Tim Walz to the Justice Department for investigation. The Trump administration laid out its broader case in a White House release in May, describing a full-scale War on Fraud spanning federal benefit programs, medical billing and now employment-based visas.
The H-1B program has been a Trump administration target for years, but this marks the first major Labor Department fraud inquiry of Trump's second term aimed squarely at the visa system. Critics of H-1B have long argued that outsourcing firms use the program to import cheaper labor rather than fill genuine skills gaps, a claim the industry disputes. The Labor Condition Application process exists specifically to prevent that outcome, requiring employers to attest they are paying market wages. If investigators can show firms falsified those attestations, the case moves from a policy dispute to a fraud case with real legal exposure.
Democrats have generally resisted tightening H-1B enforcement, wary of angering the tech and consulting sectors that rely heavily on the visa category. That makes the politics of this probe as sharp as the substance. Vance is betting that a crackdown on visa fraud plays well in a manufacturing and services state like Wisconsin, where voters have watched outsourcing debates for two decades.
The subpoenas are only the opening move. Whether they produce charges against Cognizant or any other firm will depend on what investigators find in the coming months, and the Labor Department has given no timeline for when that will become public. For now, the message from Milwaukee was blunt: the administration wants companies on notice that the H-1B program is no longer an enforcement afterthought.
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