In July 2026, Riley Moore did something members of Congress do not normally do. He wrote to the chair of the Federal Reserve and demanded that a specific private citizen be removed from an advisory panel.

The citizen was Asha Sharma, who became CEO of Microsoft Gaming earlier in 2026 and runs Xbox. She had been named a co-leader of the Federal Reserve's Productivity and Jobs Task Force, which studies how new technology — mostly artificial intelligence — affects employment. She serves on it alongside the economist Charles I. Jones and the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

Moore's letter to Fed Chair Kevin Warsh called for Sharma's removal, arguing that her recent corporate decisions raise questions about whether she belongs on a panel about productivity and jobs. On social media he framed it more directly: the "first question should be why Xbox CEO Asha Sharma" was picked while the company was cutting American jobs and hiring through the H-1B visa program.

The claim he built it on

Here is the difficulty. The thing Moore is accusing her of is not established.

Microsoft announced roughly 4,800 job cuts in the round that set this off, with about 1,600 falling in the Xbox division. Microsoft is separately one of the country's largest H-1B sponsors. Those two facts are true and they happened at the same time.

That is not the same as the second thing being the cause of the first, and Microsoft has said flatly that it isn't. Microsoft told Newsweek:

"These decisions are based on business need, not visa status. H-1B employees were also impacted by job eliminations in the U.S."

Independent experts quoted in the same piece describe the overlap as real but ambiguous. Immigration attorney Richard T. Herman: "A company can legally lay off workers and still file H-1B LCAs, but it doesn't make the optics easy to defend."

"Optics that are hard to defend" is a fair criticism of Microsoft. It is not evidence that a named executive personally fired Americans to import cheaper replacements — which is the viral version of the story, and the version Moore's demand rests on.

He did not hold a hearing. He did not subpoena Microsoft's filings. He did not ask the Labor Department to audit the company's Labor Condition Applications. He wrote a letter asking that one woman lose her seat.

The pattern

This is not the first time Moore has gone after people by category rather than conduct.

In March 2025 he introduced the "Stop CCP VISAs Act", which, despite what the name suggests, would bar every citizen of China from getting a U.S. student visa — not party members, not anyone screened for anything. Every one. Chinese American organizations including the Committee of 100 and Asian Americans Advancing Justice called it discriminatory for treating every Chinese student as a suspect based on nationality.

On the visa program itself, Moore is unambiguous. He told Fox News in July 2026:

"I think the H-1B visa program is a scam, and it's one that has been perpetrated on the American worker for far too long."

"Essentially, we shipped all our manufacturing jobs overseas and people were told to 'learn how to code.' Well, now they're being replaced with the H-1B visa workers on the coding jobs as well. So when is the American worker actually going to get a win here?"

And on his standing in the fight: "I'm certainly not the lone voice in this. I might be the loudest."

The part West Virginians should notice

Set aside what you think of the H-1B program. There's a real argument that it's used to hold down wages, and serious labor economists make it.

Look instead at what Moore does with the argument.

The workers he says he's defending are American software engineers at a company headquartered on the other side of the country. The remedy he pursued was not a bill, not an investigation, not an enforcement referral — it was getting one executive removed from an advisory panel at the Federal Reserve.

Meanwhile, the thing actually happening to workers in West Virginia's 2nd District runs through his own committee. Moore sits on House Appropriations. He led the Republican Study Committee's task force charged with turning DOGE's cuts into permanent law, calling the $9.4 billion package "only the first step — more cuts are coming." Those cuts fall on federal jobs and federal grants in a state that has fewer of both to spare than almost anywhere else.

When he asked that same committee for $50 million to get clean drinking water to McDowell County — holding up a jar of brown tap water from a constituent's home — it voted him down.

A letter about one executive's seat on a Fed panel gets written and gets covered. A jar of brown water gets voted down. Both of those are things Riley Moore did this year.

Source

Jayujyoti Mullick, "Riley Moore demands removal of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma", The American Bazaar, July 22, 2026. Photo via The American Bazaar.