Major IP Heavyweights Unite to Protect USPTO Funding: The Fee-Setting Crunch

The institutional and policy advocacy landscape surrounding intellectual property, particularly driven by major IP associations and specialized women-in-IP networks, is heavily focused right now on legislative funding stability, procedural policy reforms, and closing the gender patent gap.

The primary policy friction points and advocacy efforts involve:

1. The USPTO Fee-Setting Authority Battles

• The Core Issue: Major IP organizations, including the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA), the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO), and the International Trademark Association (INTA), joined forces in a formal legislative push targeting Congress.[1]
  

• The Stakes: The USPTO's vital fee-setting authority (which allows the agency to independently adjust fees to fund its operations, system modernizations, and patent/trademark examination pipelines) faced an expiration deadline.

Current Status: While Congress faced the hard deadline, a continuing resolution was pushed through the Senate to extend the authority through December 11, 2026. Associations are actively lobbying to ensure a permanent or long-term extension without crippling legislative strings attached.

2. PTAB Reform & Administrative Leverages

• Tied directly to the fee-setting extensions, institutional advocacy groups are clashing with lawmakers over how Congress might use the funding bill as leverage to reform the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB).
  

• Specifically, associations are tracking debates around the USPTO Director’s discretionary authority to deny Inter Partes Review (IPR) petitions, with advocacy groups pushing for either clearer guardrails, appellate review options, or strict reporting mandates.
  

3. Institutionalizing Sex-Disaggregated Data & Global Gender Policy

• On the global policy front, institutional initiatives (bolstered by bodies like WIPO and various national IP offices) are pushing to institutionalize sex-disaggregated data to tackle the persistent gender gap in patenting.[2]
  

• Advocacy centers on translating data from organizations like the European Patent Office (EPO) and WIPO, which continually show that women are underrepresented as inventors despite comparable STEM participation rates, into mandatory national equality frameworks and institutional governance structures. [3]

References: [1] AIPLA Joins IPO and INTA https://www.aipla.org/detail/news/2026/09/02/aipla-joins-ipo-and-inta-in-urging-extension-of-uspto-fee-setting-authority [2] Carpentier, E. & Raffo, J. (2023). The Global Gender Gap in Innovation and Creativity: An International Comparison of the Gender Gap in Global Patenting over Two Decades. WIPO Development Studies. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4381234 [3] Carpentier, E. & Raffo, J. (2023). The Global Gender Gap in Innovation and Creativity: An International Comparison of the Gender Gap in Global Patenting over Two Decades. WIPO Development Studies. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3730190