Longtime Donald Trump ally Steve Bannon raged over what he said was Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's massive blunder during the administration's announcement of controversial changes to the H-1B visa program, the system of work permits for high-skilled workers commonly used by the tech industry.
According to The Daily Beast, Bannon saw it as particularly infuriating that Lutnick incorrectly said that the new $100,000 fee for H-1B visas will be an annual charge, forcing other administration officials to come out and clarify it's in fact a one-time fee.
“These are not tiny details in the document,” said Bannon on his "War Room" program. “These are not in the footnotes. This is the deal. You’re supposed to be a deal guy. You’ve got to understand your own deal that you put before the president.” He added that, “All I’m saying is the Secretary Commerce sat up there and gave not just erroneous information, but patently false information. During the show, in a hot take, I can sit and go, ‘that makes no sense,’ because, if that’s true, then, hey, we kind of won—the whole program, just shut the program down.”
Bannon, who has previously called Lutnick an "unmitigated disaster" and urged Trump to pull him off of TV, has previously called for the H-1B program to be eliminated entirely — but he is on board with the Trump administration's change to make it far more expensive.
The H-1B announcement has sent tech companies scrambling, with some prominent CEOs like OpenAI's Sam Altman singing Trump's praises in what one observer theorized was a plea to give him input in minimizing the impact of the change.
Lutnick, who has been at the forefront of selling Trump's trade war, has been at the center of extensive drama behind the scenes at the White House, with reports saying he used Trump's housing finance administrator to try to dig up dirt on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose job Lutnick had been initially angling for.
