Chris Given

Chris Given is California’s state chief information officer and director of the California Department of Technology (CDT). Gov. Newsom appointed him in April 2026, and he took the oath of office succeeding Liana Bailey-Crimmins; the appointment requires Senate confirmation. He came to the role from the California Government Operations Agency (GovOps), where he had served as deputy secretary for technology and innovation since 2025, leading state technology and digital services strategy. CDT is one of the departments within GovOps — the agency in which SB 53 places the CalCompute consortium.

As state CIO, Given has set out three early priorities: modernizing the legacy systems that carry much of state government, expanding digital identity as shared infrastructure and building on California’s work in artificial intelligence. He has framed legacy modernization in budget terms, arguing the state can no longer fund $40 million to $50 million projects to meet baseline needs, and favoring incremental improvement and shared services over multiyear megaprojects. On digital identity he has pointed to the administrative burden it could remove from public benefit programs while strengthening privacy and security. On AI, CDT has moved Poppy — the state’s generative AI assistant — into production for broader adoption across state agencies. His framing question for the office is whether technology acts as a bottleneck or an enabler, with success measured by outcomes delivered rather than projects completed on time.

Before entering state service, Given was product lead for IRS Direct File, the program that enabled Americans to file federal taxes online directly with the IRS for the first time. Working as part of a joint team drawn from the U.S. Digital Service (USDS) and the IRS, Given and co-lead Merici Vinton shepherded the initiative through years of policy uncertainty, building an early proof-of-concept prototype with a team of three designers and four engineers in just eight weeks. When the program was formally green-lit following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, Given led the full product and engineering team that delivered the 2024 pilot — bringing Direct File to taxpayers in 12 states at a development cost of $24.6 million. More than 500,000 taxpayers used Direct File before the program was terminated in 2025; the team subsequently open-sourced the codebase so that state revenue agencies and other governments could build on their work.

Given’s path to Direct File was itself the product of a decade-long odyssey through federal digital service. Embedded at USDS from 2016 to 2019 and again from 2020 to 2024 — with an interval as a senior data engineer at Skylight Digital — he completed tours of duty across 10 federal agencies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Administration for Children and Families, as well as stints supporting the states of Connecticut, Illinois and the District of Columbia. During the rollout of the American Rescue Plan in 2021, he focused on Child Tax Credit provisions at the IRS and represented USDS in the early Direct File interagency policy process, while also volunteering with the United Way’s Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program to deepen his practical tax knowledge. That breadth — navigating policy, engineering and user research simultaneously across some of the federal government’s most complex benefit and revenue systems — is a direct precursor to the statewide technology leadership CDT demands.

Alongside his government service, Given has taught at the Johns Hopkins University Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, reflecting a commitment to building the next generation of public-interest technologists. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in political studies from Bard College.

Chris Given is based in Sacramento, California. As state chief information officer he sets technology strategy for California’s executive branch from CDT — a department within the Government Operations Agency, the agency in which SB 53 places the consortium charged with developing the CalCompute framework.