“They’ve cut us off at the knees!” is what I heard a few days ago from a USPTO representative in one of the USPTO’s call centers.
The USPTO has several call centers to handle calls from paying customers. This includes:
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- the “Application Assistance Unit” for patent applications,
- the “Trademark Assistance Center” for trademark applications,
- the “Electronic Business Center” for users of the Patent Center system,
- the “Assignment Recordation Branch”,
- the “Patent and Trademark Copy Fulfillment Branch”, and
- the “Receipts Accounting Division”.
In recent weeks there have been increased hold times, to wait to speak to a human being. The percentage of time that a call to one of these call centers has resulted in the “ask” being fulfilled (for example the success rate at getting some USPTO mistake corrected) has gotten worse.
Recently I placed a call to one of these call centers, listened to music-on-hold for about an hour, and reached a call center employee (I am intentionally not saying which call center it was that I had called). What I learned was that the call center employee was unable to do anything to fix the particular USPTO service failure that had prompted my call. The call center employee then said “They’ve cut us off at the knees!“. By this the call center employee meant that the call center has, in recent weeks, been woefully understaffed, leading to the long hold times for callers. And the call center employee meant that it is much harder to do anything to actually assist a caller, due to computer system bugs that go unrepaired, and due to understaffing in other internal parts of the USPTO.
My guess is that several factors help to explain these problems:
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- employees resigning due to the “Fork in the Road” emails;
- recently hired employees being let go;
- employees who rely upon work-from-home arrangements who have been told they must now show up in the office (and some of whom live so far from any USPTO office that this realistically means they have been let go).
My sense is that morale has plummeted in all of the call centers at the USPTO.
Which is all precisely what the leadership wants, isn’t it?
I have also been facing similar frustration in dealing with the application assistance unit. It no doubt relates to hiring freezes and attrition. However, I should point out that the DOC memo ordering employees to return to in person work, especially exempted the USPTO from the policy. In addition, most USPTO employees are subject to a collective bargaining agreement that permits remote work, which was also explicitly exempted.
https://www.commerce.gov/sites/default/files/2025-01/Information%20Memo%20-%20Return%20to%20In-Person%20Work_0.pdf
You say “I should point out that the DOC memo ordering employees to return to in person work, especially exempted the USPTO from the policy.” That’s not true. Go and read it again. It merely said “this document does not say what will happen at the USPTO about work-from-home.” It said “if you want to know what the work-from-home situation will be at the USPTO going forward, you will have to look elsewhere than in this document.” And indeed a day or two later, Commissioner Udupa told everybody to return to work except certain sub-categories of workers. Indeed a few days after that, I argued an appeal before the PTAB in person and to my astonishment I had two live judges in front of me. Normally there would have been only one live judge or no live judges.
I was on the phone with a supervisor a few weeks ago in a particular department, asking for help with getting a supervised employee to correct a mistake the employee had made. And against all odds, during the call he asked the supervised employee to come to the phone and he handed the receiver to the supervised employee to speak with me. They were in the same building with each other! Normally this kind of physical proximity would be rare.
Thanks for sharing those experiences, Carl. Clearly many PTO staff have returned to the office. All of the examiners I have interacted with in the past few month have told me that they are still working remotely. In any case, I have definitely experienced the same kind of issues with the AAU as you have. Perhaps, like the probationary examiners, those employees were part of the the return to office order. By the way, I have anecdotally heard that those examiners who were required to return to the office were permitted to work in office space in any Federal building to satisfy the requirement, even if that space belong to another agency. Have you heard that as well?