By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
Phil Weiser’s plan for Colorado runs 109 pages. It promises, throughout the document, to make state government simpler, faster, and less tangled in its own rules. It also proposes a new set of offices, officers, and coordinating teams to carry it out.
The Colorado Blueprint, the platform Weiser is running on for governor, tells voters he will cut red tape and streamline how the state operates.
Alongside those promises, he would appoint a Chief Innovation Officer, a Chief Housing Officer, a Chief Resilience Officer, a Director of Rural Affairs and Collaboration, and a new Office for Safe Communities to coordinate the agencies that already handle public safety.
Reading the document, the same theme shows up again and again. A problem is named, and the answer is a new position to manage it.
Whether that adds up to less government or more is a fair question to put to a candidate who is also the sitting attorney general, and whose own office offers a record to check the promise against.
A pattern across the chapters
The Chief Innovation Officer is the clearest example. The role appears in the Blueprint’s chapter on jobs and the economy, then again in early childhood, again in health care, and once more in the closing chapter, where the same officer is handed a new Colorado Innovation Team to lead. Housing gets its own separate cabinet-level post, a Chief Housing Officer, running a Colorado Housing Innovation and Coordination Team.
Weiser’s linked health care document, the Healthy Colorado Plan, adds still more. It proposes a “Mission Control” tower inside state government, a Healthcare Stabilization and Innovation Task Force, a Safety Net Stabilization initiative, and a Technology for Good initiative.
The regulatory promises stack the same way. In the jobs chapter, Weiser writes that he will direct the cabinet and every state agency to review all regulations and remove burdens that serve no safety value. Elsewhere he commits to executive orders setting rulemaking principles and ordering a benefits-and-costs review. They are separate directives, all aimed at the same task of paring back state regulation.
The precedent he cites
On regulation, Weiser reaches back to a Democratic predecessor.
The Blueprint says that in 2012, Gov. John Hickenlooper issued Executive Order D 2012-002, requiring all cabinet agencies to review each of their rules. Weiser pledges an order of his own.
That 2012 effort was part of an initiative Hickenlooper’s administration called “Pits and Peeves.” In his 2013 State of the State address, Hickenlooper said the state had reviewed roughly 7,500 rules, with more than half to be repealed or modified.
By late 2016, a review by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, drawing on state figures, put the total at more than 22,000 rules examined, with nearly 4,500 eliminated and 6,000 modified.
So the model Weiser cites is one a governor of his own party already carried out. What a new version would do differently, the Blueprint does not say. The campaign did not answer that question.
A record in his own office
Weiser has run the Department of Law since 2019. Inside it sits the Special Prosecution Unit, which supports district attorneys, particularly rural offices, on complex and multi-jurisdictional cases. Like the Blueprint’s proposed Office for Safe Communities, it works across jurisdictions on public safety.
That unit has grown. The fiscal year 2025-26 Long Bill appropriated 46.4 full-time positions and about $6.66 million to it. The staffing level was the highest in its available budget record.
Over the same stretch, its output fell.
As RMV reported in May, cases filed dropped from 90 in fiscal year 2023-24 to a pace that annualizes to roughly 16 in 2025-26. Consultations with district attorneys fell from 403 in 2021-22 to 216 in 2024-25.
More staff, fewer filed cases and fewer consultations. That is an existing state public-safety unit, under Weiser, in the same line of work his platform proposes to expand with a new office.
RMV sent the Department of Law those figures in May and asked what accounted for the decline. It did not respond. A follow-up in August also went unanswered. The campaign did not respond either.
Cutting and adding at once
The timing runs against the plan in another way. The state is closing a budget shortfall, and the current administration is cutting General Fund support from several executive offices even as Weiser proposes new leadership and coordinating structures.
Joint Budget Committee figure-setting documents for fiscal year 2026-27 show an across-the-board 2.5 percent General Fund reduction applied to the Governor’s Office, the Lieutenant Governor’s Office, and the Office of State Planning and Budgeting.
The Governor’s Office reported that the cut is “likely to slow processing times and turnaround on centralized services.”
The Colorado Energy Office is cutting $102,600 from the only General Fund program line it has.
Those same documents show what an office of the kind Weiser proposes actually costs.
The Office of Climate Preparedness, an existing three-person coordinating office in the Governor’s Office, was appropriated about $471,000 in fiscal year 2025-26. The Blueprint separately proposes a cabinet-level resilience task force led by a Chief Resilience Officer, building on the work of the existing Colorado Resiliency Office. The Commission of Indian Affairs, whose director Weiser proposes to elevate to cabinet-level status, runs about $518,000 for four staff.
The fiscal year 2025-26 Long Bill provided about $6.5 million for the 44-position core administration of the Governor’s Office and Residence.
New coordinating offices are not free, and they would arrive amid targeted cuts to existing executive-office budgets.
What the document leaves open
The Blueprint is a campaign platform, and campaign platforms promise more than they price. But the gap here is specific.
Weiser is running on a simpler, faster state while proposing a longer roster of offices to run it, citing a regulatory cleanup his own party already ran, and pointing to coordination as the fix in an area where a unit he already oversees has reported fewer filed cases and consultations despite higher staffing.
The campaign was asked to explain how the plan fits together. It did not answer.