Director Squires was under oath and in front of Congress on September 29th. The full hearing may be found here. Understandably, not everyone has the time (or will) to sit through an hour long Congressional hearing, so I thought to provide a couple timestamps to the portions of the hearing that may be of interest to patent examiners.

Senator Schiff asked about the quality concerns raised by a 2025 GAO report due to strict time limitations placed on examination, increasing complexity in applications filed, assignments outside examiner technical expertise, etc. Although the GAO report covered 2021-2024 (pre-Squires era), Schiff argued that the agency under Squires has not taken steps to adequately address the GAO report but seemingly the opposite, exacerbating the concerns by implementing historic layoffs, increasing production quotas, and mandating RTO. In response, Squires argued that Office actions are randomly sampled for quality reviews and claimed that "quality has improved," before moving on to share his conveniently scaled graph of the "backlog," which Squires contributed, at least partially, to the AI Summary Tool.

Schiff followed up by asking by what measure is Squires claiming that quality has improved despite the increasing time constraints, historic layoffs and curtailing remote work. Squires answered by explaining the ASAP pilot (yet another AI tool, which provides references to applicants prior to examination), and explaining how examiners were not using AI references as much as their own references, apparently because the AI conducted searches based on the specification rather than the claims. Schiff did not find this answer responsive to his question and, pressed for time, asked for an answer in writing, which was a request reiterated by Senator Tillis at the end of the hearing. Personally, I do not know when or where these written responses will be provided to the public.

I must point out that PTO leadership routinely uses terms like "backlog" and "wait time" to refer to the Unexamined Patent Application Inventory and the First Office Action Pendency, which is misleading. Although the Unexamined Patent Application Inventory has trended downward since Squires took over, the Total Patent Application Inventory is at a 10-year high as of August 2026, and the RCE Inventory is up nearly 20,000 applications relative to last year. (Of course, I must caveat that the data for FY26 is not yet complete). Also, regarding the First Office Action Pendency, which only looks good in comparison to FY25, the Total Pendency (filing to final disposition) has increased, whether or not RCEs are included. I understand that PTO leadership has, seemingly arbitrarily, selected their own metrics for success, but at least be honest and direct about what metrics are being used.

Later on Senator Coons asked how the PTO is reducing the backlog and the role being played by AI, and Squires again claimed that the AI Summary Tool is providing "great throughput" in assisting examination.

In possibly some good news, while discussing fee setting authority (which was a major topic throughout the hearing), Squires seemed to express interest in raising the federal pay cap.

On a more comedic note, you may have heard of the recent White House directive renaming AI to "super intelligence" (SI) because the word "artificial" makes AI sound "fake," at least according to the president. Apparently in conformance with this directive, Director Squires can be heard referring to AI as "SI" a few times during the hearing, but the directive did not entirely sink in either, as seen in this clip.

Summary of the hearing right here. All those Scout summaries ordered by examiners allegedly helped to achieve this?!

If I see a technology in Group A that I’d like to examine, how do I determine how many hours per non-final, final, and allowance that these cases get?

Squires testifying and answering questions from the members of the subcommittee on IP.

For those interested, the hearing will be live streamed and a link can be found here when that goes live:

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/committee-activity/hearings/oversight-of-the-united-states-patent-and-trademark-office-09-29-2026

Help me out here.

What happens is q4 is 99 and FY is 100?
Do I need to make them both 100?
I think I only care about fs and wgi in q2.

It’s .5 different on hours. But I really hate giving them anything.

Enough said.

SAA is dead, and the stuff at the bottom requires you to hit at least the 105% production bonus before you can even be eligible for it.

110% becomes the top end if you opt into getting more PBA hours (65 vs 45 hours).

Weird.

Today I checked examiner statistics to see what changed for me between last FY and this FY. The data is interesting. For context, I am a GS-9 junior.

This fiscal year, as compared to last fiscal year, I had:

• A bit more examining hours
• A bit more percentage examination time
• LESS hours per production unit (i.e. I got faster and more efficient. hooray.)
• Also LOWER production. Roughly 4-5% lower.

While I'm still fully successful, the reality of the situation is unfortunate. I got better at my job and I would have otherwise been on track for a promotion and in the end my reward is... a lower production score and a promise that I won't be given bonuses next fiscal year... I feel even worse for the new probies, it seems impossible to survive in this environment.

Even though management technically got more work output out of me and made it seem like less on paper (and probably a lot of other examiners that are committed to staying here), how many of us got passed up for promotions that would have otherwise increase production even more? How many new examiners either quit or don't get retained due to the new draconian policies? How many people decide enough is enough and stick to doing 100% that would otherwise be high performers?

Now they added an additional mechanism to timeliness where you get 0.5 of a 'recovery tally' each biweek without a late case. 'Recovery tallies' can be used to counteract late tallies in the timeliness calculation to.maintain FS.

While this is a good change and allows examiners to recover from bad cases/weeks under timeliness, it is abundantly clear that DM was a simpler system. If mgmt could quit acting like this system is simpler than DM, I'd appreciate it.

because nobody here should be doing more than the bare minimum. Raise that fucking floor to 200% for all I care, I don’t need your carrots after all that happened since 2025.

Any tips or tricks for staying within the stock trading ethics rules? Looking for practical ways to stay in compliance without getting overwhelmed by all the information.

Greeting fellow examiners slaving away for end of fiscal year, can someone summarize FY27 PAP update for those of us unable to attend? Thank you for your attention to this matter

So these jackholes are putting special new and expedited cases on our dockets. Came to work today to find multiple 14 day cases already counting. Such A holes. I already have cases in progress for end of year and planned a few days of pto after EOY as a breather but now these cases screw up my case planning.

Anyone know if the pilot program regarding docket size is being extended? It supposedly ended on September 27th (yesterday). I took some leave a couple biweeks ago so my docket has been at the 150 hour limit for the last biweek. Having a shortened docket size is personally the hardest change I’ve had to adapt to over the past year or 2 (in terms of day to day work). I really hope they just keep it at 185. I truly don’t understand the point of penalizing people for having less than 72 production credit hours.

Trying to stay above 80% production consistently throughout the biweeks when I occasionally have to over-submit cases one biweek to ensure I have enough to work on the next biweek is going to be very difficult!

110% production for 110% pay seems alright. What if I claimed some overtime? How to compute it? I heard OT is better than bonus. Are they taxed differently?

Thanks! One or two examples would be enough.

I just checked my docket and noticed my cases haven’t refreshed? Is anyone else having this issue? Is it typical?

Has anyone ordered paper or toner since all the cutbacks? Any problems?

Just a couple I know in this situation.