Reining in bureaucratic overreach starts at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

OPINION:

In about three decades of serving the Tri-State Area in Congress, one thing I heard repeatedly was frustration with the federal government’s lack of accountability and transparency.

In Cincinnati, those are touchstone values we learned growing up, but they are much less common in Washington. President Trump tapped into this frustration during his campaign, and now that he is back in office, his Department of Government Efficiency has led a “war on waste” across the federal bureaucracy. It’s a novel approach, and the results so far are promising.

Some federal agencies, however, can already function without waste, fraud or abuse, provided they have strong leadership at the top. Take the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which is responsible for issuing patents upon which businesses and inventors depend. The office also has the power to invalidate bad patents weaponized against productive American companies through abusive lawsuits.

In recent years, Abu Dhabi-based Fortress Investment Group and others that invest in abusive litigation campaigns have bankrolled lawsuits targeting American industries to generate a return on their investment through a portion of a settlement or jury verdict. Foreign adversaries such as Russia and China have followed the same playbook, seeking to use bad patents to target companies through the American courts.

Through the Patent Trial and Appeal Board and the administrative patent judges who serve there, however, the Patent and Trademark Office can provide relief for companies on the wrong end of a meritless claim. Companies can appeal to the board to invalidate a patent being weaponized against them if the patent is low-quality and never should have been issued in the first place.

Since its creation, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board has set the standard for what a government agency should be: swift, competent and focused on American interests. Administrative patent judges review patents faster and more accurately than our district courts, with the vast majority of their decisions affirmed by the Federal Circuit. More than 75% of patents challenged at the board are owned by foreign-based corporations, and American companies overwhelmingly bring challenges. Moreover, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board comes at no cost to the taxpayers and is funded entirely by fees.

That’s why it’s critical that, for his second term, Mr. Trump nominates a Patent and Trademark Office director who will allow the patent office to operate as intended, rein in bureaucratic overreach and once again put American businesses first.

The Trump administration should commit to strengthening the Patent Trial and Appeal Board as a bulwark to protect productive American companies. As it rightfully works to reduce the size of the government, eliminating administrative patent judges should be off the table. Downsizing or eliminating the Patent Trial and Appeal Board would be an effectively illegal act and would serve the interests of only our adversaries, Fortress and other litigation investment entities, not Mr. Trump’s “America First” agenda.

What Mr. Trump needs is a strong patent director who will stop our adversaries, including Beijing-based companies beholden to the Chinese Communist Party, from exploiting mismanaged American institutions. These companies have and will continue to use every trick in the book, including secretly backing patent infringement lawsuits in our courtrooms, to undermine and outcompete American businesses in technologies such as artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing. Straying further from the letter of the America Invents Act and the review processes it establishes for American inventors at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, our nation’s best defense against Chinese intellectual property manipulation, will only make the problem worse.

If Mr. Trump is serious about restoring government efficiency and putting America first, and I know that he is, his next U.S. Patent and Trademark Office director will adhere to a fundamental principle that the American people have long known and that the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed: Congress, not unelected bureaucrats, decides the law.

• Steve Chabot, a Republican, represented Ohio’s 1st Congressional District from 1995 to 2009 and 2011 to 2023.