GAO Says USPTO Falls Short on Oversight, Patent Quality Efforts

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a sharply critical report concluding that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has failed to effectively assess and manage its initiatives aimed at improving patent quality. The April 2025 report—prepared in response to a request from the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property—found that the agency’s efforts to improve patent examination are hampered by poor planning, inadequate oversight and misaligned performance metrics.

Despite modest reforms since the GAO’s 2016 reports, USPTO examiners say they are still incentivized to prioritize speed and quantity of output over examination quality. The report identifies multiple gaps in how the agency measures both examiner performance and overall patent quality and calls on the USPTO to adopt more transparent, outcome-based approaches.

Background and Context

The study was initiated in light of continuing concern that low-quality patents may be inhibiting innovation and inflating legal costs. According to the GAO, the USPTO granted roughly 365,000 patents in FY2024, out of over 527,000 applications. Yet roughly 40% of litigated patents are ultimately invalidated-raising questions about examination rigor.

The GAO has previously flagged many of these issues in reports GAO-16-490 and GAO-16-479. While the USPTO has implemented some recommendations since then, the 2025 report suggests the agency has not made enough progress on meaningful, system-wide reform.

The GAO’s conclusion is clear: if the USPTO is to restore stakeholder confidence in the reliability of granted patents, it must rethink how it defines, measures, and enforces examination quality. Without stronger internal controls, clearer goals, and more accurate performance data, the agency risks perpetuating a system where patents are granted too quickly and challenged too often.

Focus on Output Undermines Quality

The GAO conducted six focus groups with nearly 50 patent examiners representing most of the agency’s technology centers. Examiners overwhelmingly reported that their performance evaluations continue to be driven by production quotas-measured in “counts” for completing review tasks-rather than thorough prior art searches or legally sound evaluations of patentability

This output-driven culture, GAO found, contributes to examiners shortchanging time-intensive work such as evaluating complex prior art. And while the USPTO has made efforts to emphasize patent quality in examiner appraisals since FY2021, the report found no evidence that these changes improved examination standards.

Inconsistent Oversight and Weak Metrics

The GAO found that the USPTO lacks a formal structure for developing and evaluating pilot programs designed to improve patent quality. Of the 14 pilot programs reviewed, half did not include any outcome-based evaluation to determine scalability or long-term value. This, GAO said, reflects missed opportunities to improve future pilot efforts.

Even core supervisory quality reviews—the main tool for assessing examiner performance—suffer from reliability issues. Supervisors are not required to use random sampling in selecting cases for review, can exclude identified errors, and in some cases assign passing scores even when all reviewed work contains mistakes.

This approach, the GAO found, “likely overstates examiners’ true adherence to quality standards and may not encourage consistent high-quality examination.”

Missing the Forest for the Trees

While the USPTO tracks compliance with each statutory patentability requirement individually—such as novelty, nonobviousness and disclosure—it does not set or report a goal for how many granted patents meet all four requirements together.

For FY2023, while individual requirement compliance ranged from 92% to 98%, the share of patents that satisfied all four requirements at once was just 84%. The GAO concluded that this gap distorts perceptions of patent quality and urged the agency to establish and communicate an overall compliance goal.

The report also noted that the USPTO has not implemented any metrics to evaluate the scientific or economic value of issued patents, despite having a strategic goal to better measure innovation. The GAO pointed to widely recognized proxies such as citation frequency or real-world usage metrics as opportunities to improve accountability.

Eight Recommendations

The report included eight recommendations to the USPTO aimed at improving oversight and transparency in the agency’s quality efforts:

1. Evaluate ongoing initiatives to determine whether they are actually improving examination quality.
2. Formalize pilot program development using best practices for testing, evaluation, and scalability.
3. Update guidance on supervisory reviews to ensure better sampling and eliminate review bias.
4. Establish an overall patent quality goal that measures full statutory compliance.
5. Communicate that goal publicly to provide a clearer picture to stakeholders and Congress.
6. Assess and adopt indicators of patent value, including scientific and economic metrics.
7. Ensure more accurate measurement of examiner performance through independent reviews.
8. Improve internal controls and consistency monitoring to reduce variability in examination outcomes.

Looking Ahead

These findings call to mind concerns raised in a 2022 House IP Subcommittee hearing, where the GAO’s preliminary report revealed that a majority of PTAB judges surveyed felt pressured to conform to USPTO management’s preferences in America Invents Act trials. At the time, lawmakers and stakeholders warned that such internal influences could erode judicial independence and called for structural reforms. The latest report broadens the focus from adjudication to examination, underscoring that issues of oversight and performance metrics span the USPTO’s core functions.

While the USPTO has taken steps in recent years to modernize its tools and enhance examiner training, the GAO report makes clear that foundational issues remain unresolved. As Congress and the innovation community turn more attention to patent quality, the agency will face increased pressure to implement more rigorous and transparent standards.

This article was updated on 5-8 to clarify that reexaminations were not an area identified by examiners as a challenge.