OPM CIO Guy Cavallo announces retirement
Guy Cavallo, the chief information officer of the Office of Personnel Management since July 2021, will retire from federal service on Jan. 13, he confirmed to FedScoop.
Cavallo leaves federal service having held several top technology roles over the past decade, including as deputy CIO of the Small Business Administration and executive director of IT operations at the Transportation Security Administration. He also served as OPM’s principal deputy CIO and acting CIO before being named permanent CIO.
As the longest-tenured CIO of OPM in recent memory, Cavallo led that charge on a two-year sprint replacing or migrating over 50 applications from legacy on-premises data centers to the cloud and the launch of the new Postal Health Benefits System last year for more than 1.7 million postal workers and retirees. He touted the system as fully operational 100% of the time with no unscheduled downtime throughout the Open Season.
Cavallo also led OPM to winning several Technology Modernization Fund awards in recent years, the most recent of which came in late 2024 to support the use of artificial intelligence to update legacy mainframe programs for OPM’s retirement systems.
Before his time in the federal government, Cavallo supported agencies’ technology work in the private sector as director of public sector for Pyramid Analytics and senior government strategist for Microsoft, where he spent nearly a decade of his career. He also held roles with the City of Charlotte in North Carolina, Xerox, the Corporation for National and Community Service, and the U. S. Senate earlier in his career, among others.
“It has been an incredible career from my first jobs on Capitol Hill, where I had my first IT experiences, to being at Xerox when they released the first business PC, Ethernet, the GUI interface, etc.,” Cavallo wrote in an email to FedScoop. “Later I was at Microsoft when they released Azure. … Between those, I like to say that I have had my hands on PCs and the cloud as long as anyone in the industry could have had.”
Cavallo is a career civil servant and is not required to leave at the change of administrations on Jan. 20, like some other CIOs who are politically appointed. He maintained in his email that he is leaving by choice and has received an offer to continue his career in the private sector.
He wouldn’t reveal the new role he’s taking, saying only that he’s going to take a “short break” before announcing that next opportunity.
Cavallo is a celebrated member of federal service, recognized last month as the recipient of the 2024 Distinguished Service Presidential Rank Award. He’s also won several FedScoop 50 awards, including the most prestigious Golden Gov: Federal Executive of the Year in 2024.
