Restoring America’s Leadership in Innovation Act of 2025

Key Points

• The bill switches the U.S. patent system back to a "first-to-invent" model, where the person who actually came up with an idea first gets the patent — not just whoever files the paperwork fastest. This reverses a major change made by the 2011 America Invents Act.
• It eliminates the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and the inter partes review and post-grant review processes that companies currently use to challenge existing patents. Instead, patents could only be invalidated through regular court proceedings.
• Patents would be legally defined as private property rights, similar to owning physical property. Once granted, a patent could only be revoked by a court ruling, unless the patent owner agrees to another process.
• The bill expands what can be patented to include more software inventions and life science discoveries, overriding several Supreme Court rulings that had narrowed patent eligibility in those fields.
• Patent applications would no longer be automatically published after 18 months. Instead, applications would stay secret until a patent is officially granted, which the bill says will help prevent foreign competitors from stealing American innovations.
• All fees collected by the Patent and Trademark Office would stay with the agency in a new dedicated fund, ending the practice of Congress redirecting that money to other uses. This is meant to speed up patent processing.