> The USPTO is not horribly understaffed. They have other issues. One of the main issues is actually that the patent examiners are union, and the union is not really on board with them being asked to do significantly more work (IE searching harder), unless they get significantly more pay. In a lot of cases, they can't get significantly more pay, because there are salary caps on federal employees, etc.
Is that not something you could solve with more employees? If the task does not lend to parallelization, let each team work 2k weeks on every application instead of the current k weeks and employ doubly the amount of teams.
"Is that not something you could solve with more employees? If the task does not lend to parallelization, let each team work 2k weeks on every application instead of the current k weeks and employ doubly the amount of teams."
The USPTO does not have the budget to double their staff. They are also getting pushed as hard as possible to lower pendency periods, which are already 3+ years in a lot of cases.
If they did double their staff, the union would just demand even more concession, because they would have more power, not less.
If they doubled pendency, they'd get murdered by congress.
Is that not something you could solve with more employees? If the task does not lend to parallelization, let each team work 2k weeks on every application instead of the current k weeks and employ doubly the amount of teams.