by Dennis Crouch
Two executive orders issued by President Trump on January 20, 2025, may present significant challenges for the USPTO’s operations. The first order mandates a return to in-person work across federal agencies, while the second implements a broad federal hiring freeze. Although the outcome is still unclear, these directives could substantially impact the USPTO’s approximately 13,000 remote workers, most of whom are patent examiners, and potentially disrupt the office’s plans to expand its examining corps to address growing application backlogs and increasing pendency.
USPTO officials will likely be seeking exemptions, but the sheer number of USPTO remote workers may well undermine the administration’s broader return-to-office messaging if left unreduced.
The return-to-office mandate requires agency heads to “take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations.” While the order includes provisions for agency heads to “make exemptions they deem necessary,” the USPTO faces unique challenges given its decades-long embrace of remote work — meaning it would not currently have space or desks for even half of the examiners.
The USPTO’s telework program dates back to 1997 and has expanded significantly since then. The program has been consistently touted as improving examiner retention and expanding the potential hiring pool beyond the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. Many current examiners were hired with the explicit understanding that they would work remotely and have no assigned physical duty station. Forced relocation to one of the several USPTO offices would likely trigger significant examiner attrition at a time when the office is already struggling with application pendency.
The concurrent hiring freeze order appears to halt the USPTO’s plans to hire hundreds of new examiners this year. While the order permits exemptions “where those exemptions are otherwise necessary,” obtaining such exemptions would require coordination between the USPTO Director, the Secretary of Commerce, and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management.
Much will depend on how strongly the White House pushes for comprehensive implementation of these orders and whether the USPTO can secure necessary exemptions. The agency’s new director will likely need to marshal support from stakeholders in the patent community to make the case for maintaining operational flexibility. However, this effort may face headwinds from influential technology companies that have historically advocated for patent system reforms. Google, Meta (formerly Facebook), and Elon Musk’s companies have historically advocated for significant patent system reforms that tend to weaken patent rights. And those companies maintain strong connections to key administration officials, including the President.
The next step of this playout would be to replace the lost examiners with automation – AI tools.