Simon Cameron, the Pennsylvania party boss who served as Abraham Lincoln’s first Secretary of War, has long been credited with the rule that an honest politician is one who, when he is bought, stays bought. His War Department handed out contracts to friends so freely that the House of Representatives censured him for it. By then, Lincoln, fed up, had already named him an emissary to Russia.
Cameron was a crook, and his friends at least got their contracts. America’s technology giants have helped pay for Donald Trump’s new White House ballroom and have gotten nothing from it. The Democrats, favored to take the House of Representatives in the midterms, have promised subpoenas. A company, unlike a president, cannot plead executive privilege, the shield Trump’s officials used in his first term to avoid testifying before Congress.
Microsoft’s comedy, like most comedies of manners, opens with an invitation to dinner. On July 31 last year, Trump announced that the White House would get a ballroom, paid for by private donors. That October, bulldozers flattened the East Wing, where first ladies have kept their offices. The new hall will cover 90,000 square feet, half again the size of the residence beside it, and its price has climbed from $200 million to $400 million. Trump now says a military complex is being built underneath, and that drones will “bounce” off the ballroom roof.
How much each donor gave stayed secret for a year. This October 15, the Washington Post published a leaked list: some $330 million in all, $25 million each from Apple and Nvidia and $10 million from Microsoft.
When companies with business before the government pay for the President’s ballroom, someone is bound to wonder why. Last December, Democrats led by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congressman Dave Min asked the donors in writing: did they expect favors in return?
Microsoft’s lawyers wrote back, in a fine piece of passive English. About two months after the ballroom was announced, “Microsoft was contacted by a fundraiser.” It was invited to a dinner for supporters, “which Microsoft attended.” In September, it “confirmed that it would donate.” In this account nobody at Microsoft decides anything. The money arrives much as the weather does.
Microsoft says it wanted nothing for its money. Over the next year it got exactly that. The first sign came before the money was even sent. In May last year, Microsoft had hired Lisa Monaco, Joe Biden’s former deputy attorney general, as its president of global affairs, the executive in charge of its dealings with governments around the world. As deputy attorney general, she had been the second-ranking official at the Justice Department that prosecuted Trump.
It was a hire the President was bound to notice. Last September 26, he told Microsoft to “immediately terminate the employment of Lisa Monaco.” He called her “corrupt” and “deranged” and said he had barred her from federal property. Microsoft declined to comment and kept her. Five days later, on October 1, Microsoft paid the money, and later said the ballroom “will benefit not only this presidency, but presidencies to come.”
The White House took a year to say thank you, and then said it twice in one day. This October 8, Microsoft’s chief executive got a medal. But his company was rebuked by J.D. Vance. The same day, in the executive office building next door to the White House, the Vice President froze Microsoft’s applications to sponsor its foreign engineers for green cards, the permanent residence papers they need to stay in the US.
Microsoft needs the papers more than most companies. Many of its foreign engineers work on temporary visas that generally run out after six years, and a green card is how the company keeps them around. By the count of GeekWire, a Seattle technology news site, Microsoft had more green-card cases decided in the year to September 2025 than any other employer in America. Amazon and Google sharply cut back their own filings after early 2023. Microsoft kept filing.
“There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft,” Vance said. The freeze would last “as long as it needs to.” The green-card rules exist to stop foreign hires taking Americans’ jobs or pushing down their pay. Vance said Microsoft had laid off 6,000 Americans in 2025 and obtained 6,300 visas for temporary foreign workers. “For every worker that Microsoft laid off, they replaced that worker with one and a half foreign indentured servants.” Microsoft says four in five of those visas were renewals for people already on its staff, and that it pays them on the same scale as Americans.
Even if Microsoft followed the rules to the letter, it’s the rules that are the problem. Before sponsoring a green card, a company must show it tried to hire an American. A requirement rooted in rules written before the internet obliges it to advertise the job on two Sundays in a local newspaper. Microsoft’s advertisements ran mostly in the Seattle Times. When ProPublica investigated such listings, it found columns of ads “not really looking for applicants.”
When companies pay for the President’s ballroom, someone is bound to wonder why
By mid-afternoon on October 8, Trump had declared the head of America’s worst abuser one of the country’s “national treasures.” At the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, the building he renamed after himself, he presented the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, who in 1994 gave up his own green card and switched to a work visa because it was the quickest way to get his wife into America. Five of the six medalists that day were born abroad. Trump did not mention the freeze.
This month, America elects a new House. Robert Garcia, the Democrat in line to chair its Oversight Committee, has already joined Warren in asking whether the ballroom donors were promised favors. On October 23, he said what he wants first: “The power to investigate, to subpoena, to get documents.” His targets, he said, include “CEOs and corporations,” and he named Elon Musk.
Microsoft is not the only one bracing. Meta has put $45 million into a political fund that runs one committee for Republicans and another for Democrats, and has since taken some of it back. The Wall Street Journal reports that its executives have discussed the likelihood of subpoenas.
Microsoft helped pay for a roof that, the President says, will stop drones. That is more protection than Microsoft got for its money.
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