Vice President JD Vance has opened a new front in his administration's fraud crackdown, ordering federal investigations into nine of the country's most prominent research universities over their use of J-1 exchange visas. The schools under scrutiny are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, the University of Pittsburgh, UC Davis, Caltech, Arizona State and MIT. According to figures cited by Labor Department Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito, roughly 61 percent of postdoctoral researchers and federally funded workers at these nine institutions are foreign nationals on J-1 visas, compared with a 38 percent national average. The announcement came during an October 8 Fraud Task Force briefing at the White House, where officials also unveiled a newly formed visa fraud strike team to pursue similar cases nationwide.

Vance argued that universities are leaning on taxpayer-funded J-1 positions to pay foreign researchers and graduate students well below what American counterparts earn in equivalent roles, calling the practice an effort to undercut domestic wages using federally backed research dollars. The same day, the administration suspended Microsoft, Adobe and several outsourcing firms, including Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini, from the PERM green-card program over similar fraud allegations. Officials said the Labor Department's fraud investigations have so far led to 171 indictments and 203 convictions since the task force was established, and signaled more enforcement action is coming. None of the nine universities had issued a public response to the investigation at the time of the announcement.