Office of Personnel Management (OPM) CIO Guy Cavallo said today he will retire from Federal government service on Jan. 13 and plans to land back in the private sector later this year.
Cavallo – who has long used a strong cloud-forward approach in leading major IT transformation efforts at three Federal agencies over the past 20 years – did not disclose his expected private sector destination, but indicated he will have more to say about it in February.
He joined the top OPM tech ranks in 2020 as principal deputy CIO, became acting CIO in March 2021, and then permanent CIO in July of that year.
Notable in an era where many large-agency Federal CIOs have had relatively brief tenures, Cavallo will depart OPM as its longest-serving CIO since 2010.
“This is my last week as OPM’s CIO as I am retiring next weekend,” Cavallo said in a LinkedIn post today. “I am so proud of the tremendous run by my team to transform the CIO organization and lead OPM’s IT modernization.”
“It is hard to leave such a dedicated, hardworking team, but I am confident that they will continue to be one of the best IT organizations in the federal government,” Cavallo said.
“As for me, this is the end of my federal career, but not the end of my journey,” the CIO said. “I will continue my IT career in the private sector and will reveal more details about that in the coming weeks.”
Over his four-year hitch at OPM, Cavallo has pressed forward with IT modernization via cloud service adoption. The agency recently completed a two-year cloud sprint which saw more than 50 applications from legacy on-premises data centers move to the cloud – including numerous cybersecurity applications.
And he directed the tech work behind the recent launch of OPM’s new Postal Health Benefits System which will serve more than 1.7 million postal workers and retirees.
Cavallo’s tenure also saw OPM take advantage of funding from the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF), most recently with an $18.3 million award to help fund the agency’s ongoing push to modernize the technology underlying the Federal retirement systems that OPM administers.
“The federal government employs the largest workforce in the country, yet the technology supporting that workforce is aging and slowing us down,” Cavallo said last month when the TMF award was announced. “Modernizing the OPM mainframe is central to supporting both today and tomorrow’s job seekers, employees, and retirees.”
“This TMF funding is an investment in all federal employees’ and annuitants’ futures,” he continued. “It will accelerate the modernization of legacy systems, strengthen our cybersecurity posture, enable better outcomes for the retirement process, and help cut costs.”
Over his four-year tenure, Cavallo restocked the OPM CIO office with more than 25 key hires bringing track records for cloud and IT modernization, boosted the agency’s FISMA score by more than 50 percent, and capped off that run by leading OPM to its first-ever overall ‘A” grade on the FITARA Scorecard issued in September 2024.
At MeriTalk’s FITARA Awards ceremony at Tech Tonic on Dec. 18 where OPM picked up the award for “Most Improved” in the FITARA cloud category, Cavallo said, “We take very seriously our FITARA scores, and so it was a priority for my team – especially when we previously had an ‘F’ in the cloud category when we are one of the leaders – to move that to an ‘A,’ so I am most proud of getting that recognition.”
He gave credit for the agency’s improved FITARA scores to a “combination of my cyber team, my cloud team, and my apps team.” And Cavallo said, “OPM is a much different organization today than it was four years ago. We’re primarily cloud-based, our cybersecurity is much better than it was, and my team is fabulous.”
“Bittersweet” is how Cavallo described the decision to retire from Federal service during an interview with MeriTalk today.
“I’ve loved the work I’ve done at OPM,” he said. “I’ve built an incredible team. A lot of them have worked with me, not only in one place, but in multiple places. I’ve been able to bring the best and brightest that I’ve encountered in my career all together on one team.”
“I’m very proud of that, and of knowing that they’ll be able to continue on, and at the same time I’m also excited about moving on to my new adventures, so a bittersweet time,” he said.
Cavallo credited his entire leadership team for the tech gains the agency has made over the past few years, but also singled out a few by name.
“Our two-year sprint to the cloud involved MC Price [associate CIO], the lead of my application team, to rebuild applications; that required Joe Powers [associate CIO], the head of my IT operations team, to configure and manage the cloud; it required James Saunders [chief information security officer] and the cybersecurity team to change the way they were protecting OPM data from on-premise to the cloud; it involved my Chief Technology Officer Al Himler to be able to help us pick the best tools to move forward with that; and of course it involved Melvin Brown, my deputy CIO and my co-partner, who helped me manage all of that.”
Before joining OPM, Cavallo was deputy CIO at the Small Business Administration (SBA). Over a nearly four-year span at SBA working with then-CIO Maria Roat, SBA worked to accelerate the adoption of cloud services and benefited from that effort as demands on the agency increased dramatically during the coronavirus pandemic.
In a riveting account as part of MeriTalk’s CIO Crossroads interview series about Federal agency CIOs and their IT operations in the pandemic, Cavallo and Roat detailed SBA’s whirlwind experience with enabling the Paycheck Protection Program, dealing with a 100-fold increase in web traffic, and standing up security efforts to defeat fraudsters.
Prior to his tenure at SBA, Cavallo from 2015 to 2017 was executive director of IT operations at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where he jump-started the creation of the agency’s first cloud environment and led projects to modernize TSA’s end-user tools and business applications.
Before that, he was a senior government strategist with Microsoft from 2004 to 2013, with a focus on Federal, state, and local government. From 1997 to 2001, Cavallo was IT director for the city of Charlotte, N.C.
