That is a truly terrible metric for government entities. It&#x27;s easy to get arbitrarily many patents if you don&#x27;t care how worthless they are. The primary difficulty of getting a patent is not inventing something (which all engineers do continuously in the course of their jobs), it&#x27;s the staggering amount of bureaucracy and paperwork required to propagate it through the patent office.<p>Which when the patentee is another government agency means the government is paying a whole slew of bureaucrats to do battle with each other time and again in order to generate a meaningless metric that only actually measures how much time they&#x27;ve wasted fabricating that metric.