Colorado OIT Cuts 173 Jobs Amid Customer Satisfaction Crisis

The silence in the server rooms is usually the loudest sound in state government, but lately, it’s been drowned out by complaints. For months, the Governor’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) has been the punchline of a bad joke told in legislative committee rooms and auditor’s offices. The joke? That a department managing the digital backbone of Colorado — unemployment checks, Medicaid, tax refunds — was failing to do its job.

Here’s the thing though: the fix isn’t a new software update or a flashy AI integration. It’s a sledgehammer to the workforce.

On Wednesday, the state announced a major operational “realignment” that includes laying off 173 employees. That’s roughly 15% of the 1,150-person workforce. The official line is efficiency. The reality is a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding of trust.

David Edinger, OIT’s chief information officer since November 2023, didn’t mince words. He admitted the department’s customer satisfaction scores have been dismal, hovering between 31% and 36%. The goal was 67%. They missed it. Badly.

“We’re not going to get there through continuous improvement and tweaking around the edges,” Edinger said. “All this feedback plus the data was saying it’s not working so we said, well, it’s time to scale up this (new) model.”

The cuts are expected to save $4 million in the first full year and $8 million annually thereafter. But don’t let the bottom-line savings fool you into thinking this is just about balancing the books. The state faced a $1.5 billion shortfall, yet these cuts are explicitly not linked to that budget crunch or a rush to automate with artificial intelligence. They are linked to the heaps of negative feedback from the state auditor, legislative oversight bodies, and the agencies that actually use OIT’s services.

Picture a local small business owner trying to file taxes online. Or a family in Grand Junction waiting for their Medicaid approval. They don’t see the 173 people losing their jobs. They just see the system lagging, crashing, or failing to respond. And for years, the feedback loop has been broken.

The criticism has been mounting. Rep. Brianna Titone, the Arvada Democrat, has been particularly vocal during Joint Technology Committee meetings. She pointed out that OIT’s cash fund had ballooned to $36 million this year, suggesting the department was overcharging other state divisions for services.

“I still have questions about how it got big so fast,” Titone said in an email.

An OIT spokesperson clarified that the $36 million is currently being transferred to the state general fund and that one-time credits have already been provided back to state agencies. But the perception remains: the department was growing fat while delivering thin service.

It’s easy to forget what OIT even does. Before it consolidated 16 different IT support lines into one in 2008, every executive department hired its own IT staff, bought its own computers, and set up its own email programs. Now, there’s just one number. One team. And apparently, one team that wasn’t pulling its weight.

The Office of the State Auditor has repeatedly cited OIT for not fully addressing cybersecurity resiliency recommendations. That’s a scary thought for a state that relies on these digital pipes to move billions of dollars in public assistance and tax revenue.

The realignment began in February, a preliminary shuffle before the axe fell. But the axe is what matters now. 173 people are out. The structure is changing. The question is whether cutting the headcount actually fixes the culture, or if it just makes the remaining employees work harder to keep the lights on while the auditor keeps watching.

Edinger’s goal was simple: move the needle. He wanted two out of every three people to say OIT was a good partner. They weren’t. So he cut the staff. Now, he has to prove the rest of the 977 can do the job with fewer hands.

The servers are still humming in the background. The $36 million is moving to the general fund. And somewhere in a state agency office, a manager is wondering if the person who just left was the one who actually knew how to fix the server.