That is a truly terrible metric for government entities. It's easy to get arbitrarily many patents if you don'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's the staggering amount of bureaucracy and paperwork required to propagate it through the patent office.

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've wasted fabricating that metric.