Some updates for employees. Please use popahelp@popa.org to contact us.
E&L Statements
It has come to POPA’s attention that there were errors in E&L statements for last pay period (work 4/20-5/3 and pay date on 5/15). You might see a line with code “99” and “revocation of authoriz” with different amounts of money. Your net and gross for the pay period are probably showing up the same (if you didn’t have any extra over time hours or deductions) as the last pay period. This appears to be a multiple agency issue with NFC. POPA has informed our OHR and they are looking into it.
RIFs
On Friday, Judge Susan Illston of San Francisco issued a 14-day temporary restraining order barring the federal government from continuing with reductions in force through at least May 23, 2025, and had what seemed to be some strong language for OPM, OMB and especially DOGE. This order includes Department of Commerce of which USPTO is a part. The administration has filed an appeal. You can read numerous articles about the decision. Here is one link to the decision: Judge Illston decision
Legislation Affecting Federal Government Employees
The administration has indicated that there will be no pay raise for federal employees for January 1, 2026. This might change as we get closer to the end of the year but as of right now do not expect a pay raise in January.
A plan has been advanced in the House by Republicans to cut federal worker benefits and undermine civil service protections. Hopefully, some of these will be removed/changed before the plan matures.
Proposals include:
- Requires new hires to elect between waiving their civil service protections and becoming at-will employees or pay an additional 5% towards their retirement. This is pretty crazy as far as POPA is concerned because it would be pretty hard to manage and do what we have to do with at-will employees in current POPA jobs.
- Doing away with FERS supplement payments for employees who retire before the age of 62. This one is very concerning because it is not just for new hires but will affect all employees when the bill is enacted, especially those who took a voluntary early retirement anticipating the supplement payment as part of their retirement budget.
- Change retirement calculation from High-3 salaries to High-5 salaries.
- There are other proposals but these seem to be the most concerning for future as well as current employees.
Bullet Reporting
If you have been watching the news, you may have seen agency after agency has halted the weekly bullet reporting (latest is the IRS). USPTO employees are still stuck doing this useless task.
GAO Report
The Government Accounting Office (GAO) has issued a report “Patent Office Should Strengthen Its Efforts to Address Persistent Examination and Quality Challenges” to the Chairman, Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate on May 7, 2025. GAO held focus groups with patent examiners in September 2024, which POPA was able to observe. The examiners in those focus groups did a great job focusing on the issues of examination time, application complexity, training and routing (see the highlights section at the front of the report). In their recommendations, GAO focused on pilot programs, quality review, and metrics and communicating that information. The USPTO responded as discussed in the report but also cancelled almost every expedited examination pilot. None of the recommendations directly addressed the issues which examiners brought up in the focus groups. The GAO report is publicly available.
Washington Post article
Yesterday, the Washington Post posted an article which gives you an idea of what is happening throughout the government. The article discusses the contracts issues we are seeing at the USPTO and specifically discusses this “process” at DOC.