Former USPTO Solicitor Urges Speedy Squires Confirmation, Accuses Acting Director of Overreach

In a letter sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, former Deputy General Counsel for IP and Solicitor at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Thomas Krause, urged the Senate to quickly confirm John Squires as USPTO Director to end what he called the “unaccountable governance” of the Office by Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart.

Krause took the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) “fork in the road” offer earlier this year after 23 years with the USPTO. He has been critical of the Office on his substack since his departure.

Krause sent the Committee another letter in May strongly opposing Squires’ confirmation. In that 49-page letter, he laid out the reasons Squires’ answers to questions during his nomination hearing would be bad for the modern economy, particularly policies he articulated that would make existing patents stronger. But in his more recent letter, he explained:

“My concerns about Mr. Squires have not changed. What’s changed is that the USPTO’s current acting leadership, rather than ‘stay the course’ until Mr. Squires is confirmed, is pursuing an aggressive and probably unlawful patent-maximalist agenda that no politically accountable leader would dream of implementing.”

Krause was referring to Stewart’s interim process for workload management, under which she has issued hundreds of Director Discretionary Denial decisions so far–most of them denying institution of inter partes reviews (IPRs).

Krause’s letter noted that when former USPTO Director Kathi Vidal proposed a sweeping rules package in 2023 that included an “advanced” proposal “to use her discretionary denial authority to implement far more modest rules,” many members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet objected to it as “overstep.”

“Today’s practices – which were implemented retroactively and with zero notice to the stakeholders or the public – go far beyond those proposals, in clear defiance of Congress’s intent in enacting the AIA,” wrote Krause of Stewart’s policies.

He also took exception to Stewart’s failure to push back on the Trump Administration’s various proposals that have affected USPTO employees and administration, including return to office orders, Patent Trial and Appeal board (PTAB) leadership shakeups, and failure to fully reconstitute the Patent Public and Trademark Public Advisory Committees.

Krause’s letter pointed to several contradictions he says have arisen both in Stewart’s “settled expectations” decisions and statements/ proposals made by Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. For example, in a Statement of Interest filed by the USPTO in June in Radian Memory Sys., LLC v. Samsung Elecs. Co., No. 2:24-cv1073 (E.D. Tex. June 24, 2025), the Office acknowledged that patents are “hard to value,” but  then Lutnick in July proposed imposing new fees on granted patents that would charge patent holders somewhere between 1% to 5% of the overall value of the patent. “These positions are irreconcilable: the Office cannot claim patent value is unknowable while also proposing to levy fees based on that value,” Krause wrote.

Dozens of conservative groups appealed to Lutnick’s inventor roots last week asking him to walk the plan back.

Squires was voted through the Senate Judiciary Committee 20-2 in June, with only Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) voting no. During his confirmation hearing, Squires emphasized his goal of implementing practices to make sure patents are strong on the front end so use of inter partes reviews (IPR) at the PTAB is less necessary. And in his written responses to the committee, he reiterated this objective, noting that he also wants to make sure claims that should be issued are not rejected erroneously. “I believe it is to the benefit of all stakeholders if prior art is identified and applied at the earliest stage of examination or post issuance, as we benefit as a society from patents ‘born strong,’ beginning with the original patent grant,” he wrote.