Dear {name}:

This week, MRI Software — owned by a consortium of private equity firms eyeing a $10 billion exit — announced it is laying off between 350 and 400 American workers, roughly one third of its domestic workforce as evidenced by this notice of termination. The offshoring operations are being expanded simultaneously. Tragically, there will be no press conference. There will be no congressional hearing. There will be, in all likelihood, a tastefully worded press release about "operational optimization" and "global resource alignment."

A while back, MRI's CEO Pat Ghilani offered his employees an explanation so banal it deserves to be framed: "Other companies are doing this."

He is not wrong. They are.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce — one of the most celebrated technology executives in America — announced last year that his company would not hire a single new engineer in 2025. His support workforce had already been cut nearly in half, from 9,000 to approximately 5,000 employees. Meanwhile, Salesforce has been expanding its innovation centers in Hyderabad and Bangalore, increasing hiring in engineering, sales, and consulting teams across India. "My message to CEOs right now," Benioff declared on an earnings call, "is that we are the last generation to manage only humans."

Other companies are doing this. It is, in the language of the managerial class, simply the way things are done now.

And here is what I want you to understand: this is not the Disney scandal, where American IT workers were marched into rooms and made to train their H-1B visa replacements with the humiliation visible enough to move a senator. This is something more patient. More methodical. More deniable.

An MRI employee described to me how it works in practice. It begins gently. Americans are asked to collaborate with a new team of developers in India — can you help these guys get up to speed? Over months, the offshore team begins sitting in on meetings. Then leading sections of meetings. Then owning sections of the codebase. Then owning the product. The timeline depends on the complexity of the software. In most cases, the American worker is fully replaceable within one to two years. In one case this employee described to me, the software was so complicated it took three years before management felt comfortable pulling the trigger.

For those three years, the American worker showed up, did their job, helped their Indian colleagues learn it, and waited.

"For a long time," this employee told me, "it felt like we were just sitting in prison, waiting to be called before the firing squad."

This is the mechanism that has no name in our political vocabulary. It is not outsourcing in the old sense. It is not a plant closure. It is not a rebadging. It is a managed, multi-year knowledge transfer — disguised as collaboration, executed as displacement — that ends with an American worker handing over the keys to their own livelihood and being thanked for their service.

Now consider the political moment. Donald Trump won the presidency in part on the promise that the economic dislocation of the American worker — the one that politicians of both parties had ignored for thirty years — would finally be addressed. And on manufacturing, on tariffs, on trade, there is at least an argument being made and a policy being attempted, however clumsily.

But on this? The administration that prides itself on dominance, on deals, on never backing down, has no leverage, no mechanism, and no answer. The firing squad assembles itself quietly, like a ghost appearing in the dead of night, haunting American professionals before disappearing in the morning dawn.

The H-1B visa program that enables much of this offshore pipeline has powerful champions inside the administration itself.  The fiduciary structures that compel private equity (PE) - owned companies to optimize margins before an exit are untouched. The regulatory architecture that might give the government standing to intervene in a knowledge transfer disguised as "collaboration" does not exist. And the political constituency that would demand such intervention — the white-collar professional and salaried class, the people whose displacement looks like a Zoom call rather than a factory closing — does not yet fully understand what is happening to it.

Pat Ghilani was right that other companies are doing this. What he did not say, and what his workers already know, is that the administration promising to put America first has no answer yet.

Onward,

Kevin Lynn

Executive Director, Institute for Sound Public Policy

Founder, U.S. Tech Workers