Long before COVID 19 and remote work, there was the USPTO ‘hoteling’ system. It started in 1997 with 18 employees, and expanded to 500 employees in 2005 and 2006, as the USPTO moved to its shiny new offices in Alexandria. Over the years, the program has expanded to include pretty much any examiner with more than a year of on-the-job experience and a satisfactory review.
There are now over 10,500 patent examiners and some 85% of USPTO employees work remotely. This author surmises that many examiners, after their first year, have never worked in a USPTO office. Those examiners have built lives and raised families far away from Alexandria, Virginia, and the USPTO satellite offices.
Remote work is written into the examiners’ union agreement and is a major recruiting tool used by the USPTO to attract new patent examiners into the profession. Remote work puts Federal patent examiners (and Federal paychecks) into almost every state in the Union. The USPTO remote work program has received praise from patent commentators.
So, what about the new executive orders from President Trump mandating a return to the office and imposing a hiring freeze on all Federal agencies, which would block the USPTO from hiring its planned 1600 new examiners this year?
The mandates will likely cause many examiners to leave the agency and not be replaced, if applied literally to the USPTO. Such an exodus would certainly reduce the Federal workforce, which is, of course, the purpose. It would also hamstring the timeliness and quality of patent review, resulting in long delays and poor-quality patents. There are some government services that are inherently valuable to the public, like police and fire protection, the courts, and the patent system.
Although it may be wishful thinking on this author’s part, there is some hope that the administration will not apply the mandates literally to the USPTO. For one thing, the patent office is largely self-funded through fees, so USPTO operations have little impact on the Federal budget. For another, the President owns valuable intellectual property in the form of his trademarks, and so is aware of the value of IP.
Finally, during his last stint in office, President Trump appointed Andrei Iancu as Director of the USPTO. Mr. Iancu, an immigrant from Romania, was and is an experienced patent attorney and engineer, and did an excellent job at the USPTO. Weighing against the foregoing is the hostility of many of President Trump’s high-tech supporters to the patent system.
We can only hope that sanity prevails.
— Robert Yarbrough, Esq.