Guest blog by Chief Administrative Officer Fred Steckler as featured on the USPTO Director’s Forum.

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote.

In the United States that price has been paid by generations of veterans at home and abroad, in peacetime and war – selfless citizens who have sacrificed their time, comfort, and even their lives in defense of our nation and our allies.

At the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today, we are privileged to have many such veterans among us. Some have served in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Vietnam. Some are serving still, in the reserves, attending monthly drills and annual training and deploying into harm’s way when needed.

In 2012, we embarked on a bold initiative to greatly expand our outreach to the veteran and service member communities and significantly increase our numbers of veteran hires. Since then we have added over 600 veterans across all business units to our USPTO family. In fiscal year 2016 alone, over 23% percent of new patent examiner hires and 20% of all other new hires were veterans or transitioning service members. These impressive numbers would not have been possible without a work environment that values and honors our veterans. And that environment would not have been possible without an agency leadership committed, from the very start, to President Obama’s Veterans Employment Initiative.

We are also extremely fortunate to have the USPTO Military Association (UMA), an affinity group comprised of veterans, spouses of veterans, and employees who support our veterans, those still serving in the reserves, and the entire USPTO community. Since its formation in late 2011, the UMA has done tremendous work providing mentorship and fellowship for our agency’s military veterans and raised overall awareness of veterans and those in service today. Without them we would not have agency-wide events like our annual Memorial Day observation or the Veterans Day ceremony we held on November 8 with guest speaker Dave Lavery of NASA.

So on behalf of our entire USPTO leadership team, I want to thank our veterans for their service and for “Continuing to Serve” – to quote the UMA’s motto – at America’s Innovation Agency.