Coalition Letter in favor of USPTO NPRM to Improve PTAB

September 4, 2026

The Honorable Howard Lutnick
Secretary of Commerce
1401 Constitution Ave., N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20230

Dear Secretary Lutnick:

We conservative leaders commend and thank you for your leadership and support of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to improve the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB) practices for instituting inter partes review (IPR) challenges (Docket No. PTO-P-2025-0025).

We recognize that this much-needed rule would not have been proposed or shepherded through the rulemaking process if you thought it was not reasonable and necessary. Nor would this proposal be as substantively meaningful in bringing fairness, efficiency, and predictability to patent validity adjudication at PTAB, had you not greenlighted this initiative. Thank you and USPTO Director Squires for pursuing this long overdue administrative reform. This gives you a golden opportunity to enact a significant new policy through administrative action instead of waiting on Congress.

As you know, Congress, in the America Invents Act (AIA), intended IPRs to be a faster, cheaper alternative to district court patent litigation. That promise has not been kept.

Instead, PTAB provides mammoth incumbent corporations, their allies, and foreign national champions a second front to attack valuable patents until they wear them down or invalidate them through years of serial and duplicative challenges, facing challenger-friendly rules in PTAB patent validity cases. More than half of IPR petitions are repeat challenges, while more than 80 percent of IPRs duplicate ongoing litigation. Thus, multiple PTAB challenges perpetuate uncertainty, deny patent owners quiet title, and impose extra costs that reduce the inventor’s investment in R&D for commercialization.

USPTO’s proposal delivers the “one bite at the apple” Congress said it was making law. Under the rule, petitioners will have to stipulate they will not pursue overlapping §102 or §103 invalidity arguments and will refrain from seeking PTAB review when judicial or administrative adjudication has held that the claims in question are valid. The rule gives meaning to USPTO’s existing authority to consider the effects of its regulations on “the economy [and] the integrity of the patent system.”

Director Squires testified last fall to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property about how reliable patent protection fuels America’s economy and national security. The proposed rule’s finality and predictability will help secure the unique intellectual property foundation of U.S. leadership in critical and emerging technologies.

USPTO has invested significant resources in producing and shepherding PTO-P-2025-0025 to this point. It has been nearly nine months since the NPRM’s public comment period in which many of us participated. The final rule is now at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). We applaud the foresight of beginning this rulemaking early in the second Trump administration. Now, what is needed is doing all that can be done to ensure that OMB issues this final rule. We respectfully ask you to urge OMB to issue this rule.

Our requesting your direct involvement is grounded in the outcome of a similar USPTO NPRM in the final year of the first Trump administration. In short, USPTO proposed a rule to deny institution of PTAB reviews in similar circumstances to the present proposal—repeated bites at the apple when a challenge is duplicative, superfluous of present litigation, against already adjudicated patents, or has adverse effect on the economy or patent system integrity. OMB ended up not issuing that rule because opponents piled on and cowed OMB. Well, the same interests are back, heavily outnumbering propatent groups meeting with OMB in the final, make-or-break stage of this process, and aiming for the same outcome.

We strongly support this reform-minded NPRM because it advances fairness, due process, and predictability. We deeply appreciate your and USPTO’s leadership on this proinnovation, proeconomic growth rule. We ask you to weigh in at this juncture and help get this crucially important rule across the goal line, which would be your legacy.

Respectfully,

cc: USPTO Director John Squires

*Some organization names appear only for identification purposes.