(Originally published by Bloomberg Law on October 27, 2025.)

NASA engineers coined the term “rapid unscheduled disassembly” as a euphemism for spacecraft suddenly exploding. In the past nine months, we have seen rapid unscheduled disassembly within our government as the Trump administration has gutted entire departments, laid off tens of thousands of workers (with plans to lay off hundreds of thousands), and demolished many of the norms and institutions we relied on.

Now rapid unscheduled disassembly has come for the US Patent and Trademark Office. The latest blows are its Oct. 16 proposal to sharply narrow when a patent’s validity can be challenged in administrative tribunal proceedings, followed by Director John Squires’ Oct. 17 announcement that he would take over the task of deciding whether to institute those challenges.

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