It has to be one of the first things because they want to use it to weed out the test memorizing people paid to take the lab by the companies that then sell lab cheat sheets/ non-honest classes. It's only another hoop for those people to jump through but it may make a dent for a time.

In theory they can't lay off a ton of people in the US without pushing the H1B's out the door first - but it's unlikely they'll want to lose a bunch of their most cost effective workers. Be interesting to see what happens, they could have layoffs without layoffs (say it's all performance based), or the US could escape most of the cuts while the rest of the world gets layoffs. Suspect we'll see soon.