U.S. President Barack Obama visits a science and technology high school in a suburb of Washington, D.C. Friday to sign a bill that streamlines U.S. patent and trademark law.

White House officials say processing patent applications faster, cutting down a backlog of nearly 700,000 applications, will speed up creation of new jobs.

Supporters of the bill say speeding up the process will get new products on the market faster and increase economic growth. Critics say the streamlined process gives an advantage to bigger companies over small business.

The U.S. Patent Office itself is expected to open satellite offices across the country and hire as many as 2,000 more patent examiners over the next fiscal year.

The legislation changes the U.S. system of issuing patents from “first-to-invent” to the “first-to-file” a patent application, which is standard in much of the rest of the world. Previously, the patent system has been clogged by legal battles over which applicant was the first to invent a given product.

Also Friday, the president is expected to announce new programs to cut the time and cost of developing new drugs, and a prize offered by the National Science Foundation to reward U.S. universities that create projects accelerating economic growth and job creation.