DOGE Threatens the Stability of the U.S. Trademark System
Author Note: My law firm, Gerben IP, has filed 14,500+ trademark applications with the USPTO over the past 17 years. We have a good working relationship with many USPTO trademark examiners and senior officials in the agency. I have been discussing the DOGE policies with them over the past few weeks. The following article explains the situation within the USPTO as of February 20, 2025, and my concerns for what may come next.
The USPTO staff is in turmoil.
Almost everyone at the agency is worried about their job security.
As you have likely heard, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has implemented policies aimed at significantly reducing the number of federal employees.
Many people think these actions are long overdue.
I will be the first to tell you that the USPTO is an imperfect agency. It could be better. A lot better.
However, as someone who has worked with the USPTO daily for the past 17 years, I am also here to tell you that it is vitally important to our nation’s economy. And there is a better way to make the agency more efficient than reducing the number of people who work for it.
The USPTO’s trademark division exists to serve a purpose:
Enable individuals and businesses to register and protect trademarks.
To do this, the USPTO has recruited and trained highly specialized employees with deep expertise in trademark law. It spends years training and developing employees so that they can examine and register trademarks. It also has judges and specialized paralegals that run specialized courts to rule on trademark disputes.
If DOGE policies result in significant resignations and/or firings at the USPTO, the entire trademark system, which almost every business owner in America relies on, will grind to a halt.
DOGE policies are threatening the USPTO workforce
The first culling of the USPTO workforce began on January 28, when the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent an email offering deferred resignation to federal employees. If accepted, a federal employee would receive pay and benefits through the end of September 2025 and be exempt from any other reduction measures.
On February 6, the Commissioner for Patents, Vaishali Udupa, notified the USPTO of her immediate resignation as part of the deferred resignation offer. As I posted on LinkedIn, having such a senior employee accept the offer has rocked the agency.
Since that time, multiple USPTO employees confirmed to me that nearly all communication within the agency has ceased. People are not talking to one another. Even the daily hum of communication between employees that helps keep trademark filings moving has stopped.
I am told this is because employees are scared and do not know what to say to one another. It is clear that productivity is suffering. Some examiners have stopped returning routine phone calls and emails.
Moreover, it has become clear that on top of the voluntary resignations, DOGE will continue to cut government spending by reducing the federal workforce by simply firing employees. It is most likely that “probationary” employees are likely to be the first to go.
A probationary federal employee is either a recent hire to an agency or a long-serving employee who has accepted a new position within the government. The probationary period varies for each federal agency but is typically one to two years.
According to an anonymous source, approximately 100 trademark Examining Attorneys have been hired by the USPTO in the last two years. All of them face potential termination from DOGE as “probationary employees.”
This represents about 10% of all examiners. If these examiners are terminated a source within the USPTO indicated that it will take significantly longer than the current 10 months for the USPTO to review a trademark application.
Even if DOGE does not lay off the USPTO’s probationary employees, the mandate that all federal employees return to the office could result in mass resignations.
The USPTO has leveraged remote work to attract and retain top talent from across the country since the 1990s. It is the first federal agency to be almost fully remote and has been so since long before the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to a Bloomberg News article, 96% of the USPTO’s employees currently work remotely1 from all over the United States. A forced return to in-office work would likely drive away highly skilled employees who are not willing or able to relocate to Washington, D.C. As one Examiner told me privately, “I cannot uproot my kids and move 1,500 miles away to Washington DC.”
One of the most striking aspects of DOGE’s actions is the failure to recognize that the USPTO operates differently from most other federal agencies. Unlike agencies reliant on taxpayer dollars, the USPTO is 100% self-funded through the fees paid by trademark and patent applicants.
This unique financial structure ensures that its employees are not a burden on taxpayers.
By applying blanket cost-cutting measures to the USPTO, DOGE is unnecessarily interfering with an agency that funds itself and provides a critical service to American businesses.
DOGE firings will affect every business in America
If the USPTO were to lose a significant number of employees due to DOGE’s actions, the fallout would not be limited to the USPTO itself. It will extend to every business that relies on trademark protection.
Delays in obtaining trademark registrations can disrupt product launches, hinder brand protection efforts, and create uncertainty for investors and stakeholders.
Even before DOGE came into the picture, the USPTO has struggled with increasing backlogs. Trademark applications, which once took three to four months to review, now take an average of 10 months before they are reviewed by the USPTO.
For more information on recent trademark processing delays, see: Trademark Gridlock: Why the USPTO is Processing Trademarks at a Historically Slow Rate
Ultimately, any workforce reductions or forced office returns would leave the agency severely understaffed, leading to a potential years-long backlog in reviewing trademark applications.
For companies preparing for mergers, acquisitions, or fundraising, the inability to secure trademark registrations in a timely manner can affect valuations and negotiations. For those selling products online, trademark registration is a critical tool in the fight against counterfeiting. On a day-to-day basis, hundreds of thousands of businesses rely on trademark registrations issued by the USPTO to protect their brands.
Intellectual property is a critical asset, and prolonged uncertainty surrounding trademark applications could deter business growth and cause chaos in the marketplace.
How DOGE can improve the USPTO
With the foregoing in mind, I am actually a proponent of the idea behind DOGE.
Our government should be better managed and more efficient. The USPTO should process trademark applications quicker and with a higher degree of quality than it currently does.
But the USPTO is not a budgeting problem. The agency’s employees do not cost taxpayers a dime. The idea that DOGE can just get rid of a certain number of employees at the USPTO and it will become a better agency is misguided lunacy.
If DOGE were serious about building a stronger USPTO, here is where I would start:
- Hire experienced trademark attorneys who are currently in management roles in private practice.
- Pair these attorneys with current USPTO executives to create a task force that focuses on how to process trademark filings quicker and more consistently and with greater quality than is currently the case. Ensure the task force develops clear metrics that can be measured.
- Review the work of examiners and dismiss those who have underperformed. But only dismiss examiners at the same rate that new ones can be hired. Ultimately, we have a numbers problem. A single examiner can only process so many applications per year. If you get rid of too many too quickly, the system will grind to a halt.
- Hire an IT team to study ways to incorporate AI tools in the USPTO’s process to make examiners more efficient and more accurate. Over time, this may enable the USPTO to employ fewer people and/or handle surges in filings.
If these steps were taken, I believe DOGE could methodically make the USPTO better.
However, if DOGE continues on its current path and seeks to indiscriminately reduce the USPTO workforce because it believes that simply terminating employees will make the agency better, we will see an unmitigated disaster in about 6 months time. This is when every company will start to realize that trademark applications will take years to process.
Trademarks are too vital to the economy to be jeopardized by a rash reduction in the USPTO workforce.
DOGE and the incoming USPTO Director should make changes at the USPTO.
But, I hope they do it in a productive way that enables the USPTO’s existing employees to better serve business owners who are seeking trademark protection.
Sources
- Shapiro, Michael, and Annelise Levy. “Patent Office Orders Teleworking Examiners Back to the Office.” Bloomberg Law, 5 Feb. 2025, news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/patent-office-orders-teleworking-examiners-back-to-the-office.
Josh Gerben, Esq.
Josh Gerben, Esq. is a nationally recognized trademark attorney and the founder of Gerben IP. Since launching the firm in 2008, he has overseen the registration of over 10,000 trademarks and handled over 1,500 trademark disputes. Josh's practice focuses on building and defending global trademark portfolios for clients. These clients include entrepreneurs, private equity-backed businesses, athletes, celebrities, and public companies. Frequently quoted by major media outlets like CNBC, CNN, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, Josh is widely regarded as a leading authority in trademark law.
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