By Keith Perine, CQ Staff

As House Republicans scrambled to strike a deal on a dispute over fee provisions that is holding up a patent overhaul bill, a Democratic appropriator sketched out the potential contours of a compromise.

Several top Republicans are opposed to a central feature of the bill (HR 1249) — part of what the GOP calls its jobs agenda for the 112th Congress — that would allow the beleaguered U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to keep all the fees it collects.

The fate of the bill depends on whether its sponsor, Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, can engineer a compromise that ensures the patent office gets more money while respecting the authority of congressional appropriators. The chairmen of the House Budget and Appropriations committees have objected to the provisions.

Pennsylvania Democrat Chaka Fattah, the ranking member of the House Appropriations subcommittee that handles patent office funding, said negotiators are “99 percent there” on an altered funding mechanism.

Fattah, who has also signaled concern with the fee provisions, said negotiators have developed a proposal whereby the patent office would estimate how much money it would need in advance, and then receive those funds through an appropriation. Fattah said any additional revenue the patent office generated would go to a reserve fund that would be available to the patent office after it submitted a spending plan to appropriators.

But it is unclear whether House negotiators will agree to that kind of approach. Smith declined to discuss specifics, but said negotiators were passing around language and hoped to strike a deal Thursday.

A Tough Sell

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor R-Va., announced that Republicans intend to bring the bill to the floor next week. But any deal short of one that lets the patent office keep all the money it collects is going to be a tough sell with the Obama administration, the private sector and the Senate.

The patent office, which is struggling under a years-long backlog of applications, generates much more money in fees every year than it receives in appropriations. And the office would be assigned new duties under other provisions of the legislation.

“We cannot successfully implement patent reform legislation without full access to the fees we collect each year,” a spokesman for the patent office said. “It’s just that simple.”

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., a leading proponent of the fee language in the Senate, declined to be specific about what sort of compromise he would accept. But Coburn said the government shouldn’t “steal” the excess money from the patent office and use it for other purposes. If the patent office is generating such excess revenue, he said, it would be better to lower the fees than allow the money to be siphoned off to other government programs.

Coburn also made clear that some form of fee language was an essential element of the legislation.

“If fee diversion isn’t in there, there isn’t going to be a patent bill,” Coburn said.