USPTO Hiring Freeze Ends, Patent Examiners Wanted

USPTO Headquarters

Earlier today the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) posted job openings for patent examiners and trademark examining attorneys on USAJobs.gov.

The USPTO receiving authority by the Trump Administration to hire was no easy lift. IPWatchdog has learned that the USPTO has been tirelessly working with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for 4+ months in an effort to convince OPM to give the USPTO a waiver that would allow the Office to once again start hiring examiners.

The job postings that went live today are part of the USPTO’s effort to address the historic patent backlog left by the Biden Administration and to reduce ballooning pendency. The USPTO has already made great strides under the leadership of Acting Director Coke Stewart, with the pending, unexamined patent application backlog already dropping by 32,000. The addition of reinforcements to the examining corps. will undoubtedly help the USPTO bring the the overall inventory of unexamined patent applications down into the 500,000 range, as Stewart recently said was the goal.

The postings are opening on a rolling basis with positions in a variety of scientific disciplines, including: (1) biology; (2) biomedical engineering; (3) chemical engineering; (4) chemistry; (5) computer engineering; (6) computer science; (7) electrical engineering; (8) mechanical engineering; and (9) physics.

USPTO hiring commences as the Trump Administration continues to otherwise pursue efforts to downsize the federal government, efforts that have included the offering of severance to federal government workers and a government-wide hiring freeze. This hiring freeze lead to the USPTO retracting some 600 outstanding job offers to patent examiners earlier this year. Meanwhile, normal attrition in the patent examining corps. has continued. If the hiring freeze remained in place and normal attrition continued it would have placed an impossible burden on the USPTO leadership at a time when the agency is taking an “all hands on deck” approach to addressing the historic patent backlog and unacceptable pendency.

The USPTO, which is 100% user fee funded and does not take any taxpayer funding, now finds itself in an enviable position. With other federal agencies still facing a hiring freeze this may be a once in a generation opportunity for the USPTO to hire the best and brightest scientific and technical minds in the DC area, including many highly educated and well-trained former government workers who were released by other agencies over the last several months.