Morale Craters at Patent Office in Unusually Strained Transition

The typically apolitical and staid US Patent and Trademark Office has been swept up in the Trump administration’s effort to reshape the federal workforce, catching employees off-guard and sinking morale at the agency.

Mandates on slimming down the workforce and returning federal employees to offices surprised many PTO employees because the agency has offered remote work for nearly three decades and is funded by user fees, not taxpayer dollars.

The result: Morale is “horrible,” “in the toilet,” and the lowest in decades, according to interviews with 16 current and former employees, several of whom spoke with Bloomberg Law on the condition of anonymity.

The agency remains under a hiring freeze and has lost workers at the same time leadership is encouraging employees to boost productivity to meet its goal of clearing the 800,000-plus patent application backlog. Combined with a campaign to clamp down on leaks, the looming threat of layoffs, and other policy changes, employees said the transition has bred a culture rife with rumors, paranoia, and disillusionment.

“The kind of draconian measures and budget cuts happening weren’t needed at the PTO,” said Fred Steckler, former chief administrative officer who left the PTO in April.

“The distressing thing is what’s happening to the people—that’s going to end up hurting the mission,” Steckler added. “People that are happy about where they work and feel like they’re valued, it just results in better performance. The lack of concern for the people is devastating for the agency.”

In the first months of the Trump administration, two thirds of the PTO executive board has been replaced with acting officials, and the agency has lost roughly 13% of judges from its administrative tribunal along with hundreds of employees who examine patent applications, according to public statistics. The current and former PTO employees told Bloomberg Law they’re concerned low morale will worsen the bleed of experienced employees.

“We’re being treated not as professionals by people who have no understanding of what we do,” an administrative judge on the agency’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board said. “The job is being made unnecessarily difficult for no articulable reason.”

Agency Leadership

As a sub-cabinet agency, the PTO’s director is often not confirmed until well into a new administration. Trump’s first director, Andrei Iancu, was announced in September 2017 and confirmed in February 2018. Biden’s pick, Kathi Vidal, was announced in October 2021 and confirmed in April of 2022.

Trump nominated John Squires to be PTO director much earlier, in March. Squires appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee May 21. A vote to advance the nomination to the full senate is scheduled for this week.

Coke Morgan Stewart—Iancu’s former chief of staff—has been acting director since Trump’s inauguration, and the period has been unusually active. The agency revoked the Biden administration’s memorandum limiting discretion to turn away patent challenges, established new procedures attorneys said would limit validity challenges, and created a new director-review process giving the PTO chief more and earlier discretion to deny those petitions.

Vaishali Udupa, the former commissioner of patents who resigned in February, said the weeks before her exit were marked with “chaos and cruelty.” People were crying and frustrated, she said, and seeing several senior employees depart concerned her about a loss of institutional knowledge.

“A transition at our agency is usually pretty smooth, and that’s not occurring,” said Kathy Duda, a recently retired patent examiner and former president of the Patent Office Professional Association, the union representing more than 9,000 examiners and other employees.

The PTO declined multiple requests to comment for this story.

Prioritizing Morale

Vidal, who left the director position after the November election, said employees had some complaints when she took the reins, such as frustration over a lack of pay raises. But she said morale remains higher when PTO employees buy into a meaningful mission.

“The mission has to be something bigger than we need you to crank out ‘X’ number of patents this year,” Vidal, now at Winston & Strawn LLP, said.

The agency has prioritized examiners processing more patent applications to cut down its growing backlog—a focus on quantity that a recent Government Accountability Office report said comes at the expense of quality.

The agency has reduced the value—or “credit"—of each decision PTAB judges make, pushing them to work through more appeals of rejected patent applications to hit their yearly production targets. It also slashed travel expenditures by 86% year-over-year, according to an April LinkedIn post by Stewart.

Leadership informed the workforce in March it would face layoffs, though there’s been no reductions in force like those at other federal agencies.

In April, employees in the PTO’s office of public engagement were told they’d be shifted from a periodic background-check process to a continuous evaluation to “ensure the continued reliability, trustworthiness, and loyalty of federal employees,” according to an email from outreach program director NaThanya Ferguson reviewed by Bloomberg Law. After rumors the continuous vetting process included social media monitoring, employees freaked out, said one employee granted anonymity. The program was paused the next week.

The agency has reminded employees not to “forward information” they are “unauthorized to share,” as expressed in one email in April from Chief Information Officer Jamie Holcombe. In a May email, the agency said it was cutting off employees’ access to personal email accounts from work laptops to prevent “data loss.”

“It’s just been a little bit like living in a sci-fi movie,” said a PTAB judge who left the agency. “’Dystopian’—that’s the word I’m looking for.”

Some new initiatives have helped stem the frustration, employees said. In March, leadership introduced a pilot bonus program for examiners to earn as much as 2.7% of their salary per quarter if they spend more time working through applications. One patent examiner said the program has garnered a lot of interest and may help with morale.

In February, Stewart invited employees to an informal meetup to connect with leadership and other colleagues. Stewart also posted a schedule of town hall meetings with different units of the PTO, writing in an April email obtained by Bloomberg Law that she knows this is an “unprecedented time” for the agency and federal government, and that it was important to “address questions or concerns.”

Return to Office

PTO employees such as patent examiners, tech support staff, and some attorneys are covered by POPA’s collective bargaining agreement.

In 2024, POPA secured a fresh agreement with the agency, the first contract negotiated in 40 years. The agency also signed a side agreement locking in remote work protections until June 2029. Patent examiners make up more than half of the agency’s workforce of nearly 15,000 employees and have generally been exempt from return-to-office mandates.

POPA filed a grievance with the PTO after it called probationary patent examiners within 50 miles of an office to come into work.

Managers and PTAB judges aren’t members of the union and have been asked to return to in-person work. Since Trump’s inauguration, roughly 30 judges have left the board, Chief Judge Scott Boalick said during a May PTO webinar.

Part of employees’ frustration stems from the way the return-to-work was rolled out, which several judges described as chaotic and sudden. The headquarters in Alexandria, Va., was short on chairs and monitors, and some workers were temporarily placed in different buildings, according to two employees.

William Perry III, a PTO human resources specialist who works on onboarding and mentoring, said morale was high on his team and agency leadership had been properly communicative with staff.

“I haven’t seen employees leave the agency just because they couldn’t telework,” Perry said.

But multiple departed administrative patent judges pointed to broader concerns as weighing even more than the renewed commute.

“The constant sense that I could lose my job at any time, and general disrespect for federal employees, which go hand in hand, was really the reason why I left,” one said.