According to the USCIS, while processing times have reduced significantly over the past year, if the 540-day automatic extension rule was not announced, nearly 8 lakh EAD renewal applicants would have faced a lapse in their employment authorisation and nearly sixty-eighty thousand American employers would have been negatively impacted. Immigration experts point out that hundreds of EAD applications of Indian spouses of H-1B visa holders are caught in the processing backlog.