Joseph Edlow, the new director of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) says that the U.S. citizenship test is too easy and needs to be changed.

Edlow told The New York Times that the Trump administration plans to make changes to the H-1B work visa, which has been at the centre of the legal immigration debate for several months now.

"I really do think that the way H-1B needs to be used, and this is one of my favourite phrases, is to, along with a lot of other parts of immigration, supplement, not supplant, the U.S. economy and U.S. businesses and U.S. workers," Edlow said.

The present administration has previously hinted at plans to update or modernise the legal immigration system, focusing on illegal immigration enforcement instead for much of its first six months.

Edlow's comments mark a change in messaging from USCIS as it seeks to deliver on President Donald Trump's immigration agenda.

The U.S. citizenship test was random and non-standardised before 2008, when the George Bush administration introduced a standardised civics test that required applicants to correctly answer six out of 10 questions, out of a possible 100.

However, during Trump's first administration, that number was raised to 128, and the number of correct answers was increased to 12 out of 20, before the Biden administration switched it back in March 2021, and a planned redesign announced in the last few years was halted after largely negative feedback in late 2024.

Edlow revealed plans to return to a 2020-era style test soon.

While reacting to the H-1B visa, which has been widely criticised as being used by companies to favour foreign workers on low wages over American-born employees, Edlow said there was a place for the program, but it should favour companies paying higher wages instead.

Access24 News gathered that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees USCIS, was looking at changing the current lottery-style system for H-1B selection and replacing it with a "weighted selection process" that would help with Edlow's approach.