Fed appoints Xbox chief Asha Sharma to jobs task force days after Microsoft layoffs draw H-1B backlash

Washington's escalating scrutiny of the H-1B visa program met Federal Reserve institution-building on Thursday when the central bank named the chief executive of Microsoft's Xbox division to a newly created advisory panel on jobs and productivity. Asha Sharma received the appointment days after announcing the elimination of 1,600 positions within Xbox, part of broader Microsoft cuts that will total 4,800 jobs.

The appointment and the task force

Sharma joins the "Productivity and Jobs" panel alongside Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen and Stanford University economics professor Charles I. Jones. Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh framed the advisory effort as a review of whether the central bank's analytical tools and policy approaches can be sharpened. "The Federal Reserve's commitment to price stability and maximum employment is unwavering," Warsh said in a statement, adding that each panel would "carefully consider whether policymakers' means and methods, analytical tools and policy approaches can be improved upon."

The overlap between the appointment and the Xbox layoffs drew an immediate public backlash. Data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services showed that Microsoft had been approved earlier this year to hire 2,273 foreign H-1B visa workers. Critics drew a direct line between those approvals and the positions eliminated this week. Microsoft, in a statement to Fox News Digital, said the layoff decisions "are based on business need, not visa status" and noted that H-1B workers were also among those let go in the U.S.

Cross-border labor flows and the Fed's mandate

The appointment landed inside an already charged debate over cross-border labor. On Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance announced at a press conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that the Department of Labor had opened dozens of subpoenas and investigations into fraud within the H-1B program. "American jobs ought to go to American workers and not foreign fraudsters," Vance said.

A task force named "Productivity and Jobs" now sits at the intersection of that enforcement push and the Federal Reserve's own maximum-employment mandate. Advisory panels carry no direct policy weight. But the choice of Sharma, given the timing, has compressed the political space around a Fed that is already recalibrating its institutional posture under Chairman Warsh.

The macro caveat

Warsh said he sought "the best minds from a range of disciplines" to help sharpen the central bank's performance. The sector-wide read-through is less routine: the H-1B investigation Vance announced signals that executive-branch pressure on tech industry hiring practices is widening, and the debate is now attached to the Fed's public credibility as well as Microsoft's. Microsoft and the Federal Reserve had not returned Fox News Digital's requests for comment as of publication.