State employees who say they are already overworked due to high vacancy rates are concerned they’re going to be stretched even further after Gov. Jared Polis implemented a hiring freeze for Colorado government agencies this month.
Polis announced the freeze at the same time he called this week’s special session of the state legislature, and for the same reason: in response to the impacts on Colorado’s budget from the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, the federal tax and spending measure passed by Congressional Republicans earlier this summer and signed into law by President Donald Trump.
“Our hope is that these proactive measures will prevent more severe actions such as furloughs or layoffs,” Polis said in a statement. “This isn’t a decision I wanted to make, but unfortunately H.R. 1 is forcing the state to make difficult budget decisions, and the Executive Branch is looking at what we can do to practice what we preach and do what we can to alleviate the financial burden created by the federal government.”
The freeze takes effect on August 27 and will last until the end of the year.
But state agencies are suffering from an existing 20% vacancy rate, and with so many positions sitting empty, employees say they are already forced to do their work without adequate staff.
“I think we're often relied on to do the work when it's important, regardless of whether it's in our job duty or it's the role of a vacant position. So we do the work. We work longer, we work later,” said Madison Cappa, an employee with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
Cappa’s job is to oversee many of Colorado’s safety net health centers to ensure their policies allow patients to access primary care regardless of their ability to pay for it. Her division is responsible for overseeing 100 organizations and more than 500 clinicians across the state.
But she is one of only three employees on her team. While the division is supposed to include at least two more positions, they have been sitting open and unfilled for years. Cappa and her colleagues have to take on larger caseloads and responsibilities outside their job descriptions.
She said the hiring freeze could exacerbate the problem.
“My biggest concern is that, as we continue to get work piled on us without getting additional support, that people will really come to that point where their morale is so low that they have to decide between keeping these positions and trying to find something else and take better care of themselves,” Cappa said.
Hilary Glasgow, head of CO Wins, the union representing nearly 30,000 Colorado government workers, said many of its members have been feeling overworked and underpaid for a long time.
“Most people are performing the functions of multiple jobs, and that's before the hiring freeze,” Glasgow said. “It’s just a result of an inability to bring people into public service because of the low pay.”
Historically, state agencies haven’t offered pay that’s competitive with the private sector, although that’s improved in recent years. CO Wins helped secure the right for state workers to negotiate wages in 2020 and, in 2022, raises based on how long an employee remains in a position.
Glasgow also said the hiring freeze isn’t at the core of the problem, even if it is worrying the workers she represents. She blamed the federal government’s spending and tax bill for reducing Colorado’s revenue by more than a billion dollars and forcing the state to cut spending in a variety of areas, including new hires.
“People are concerned and definitely care about this and understand that that $1.2 billion cut has come from nowhere else than the federal government. That's where it's coming from. It's the federal administration,” Glasgow said.
The governor’s office is not implementing a blanket hiring freeze across state agencies. Instead, it’s examining individual positions and their impacts before putting them on hold in order to “protect public safety, care for those in our custody, and maintain other critical functions.”
The move is also just one of several state efforts to address the loss in revenue from the big, beautiful bill.
“The hiring freeze is the first step that the governor really took financially,” said State Sen. Jeff Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat and member of the legislature’s budget committee. “I think it was his way of saying the governor is taking this just as seriously as he expects the legislature to.”
Outside of the hiring freeze, Colorado Democrats are trying to roll back tax breaks for businesses and pull money from the state’s reserve fund during the special legislative session currently underway at the State Capitol.
Republicans argue the state should focus on streamlining the budget and rolling back what they consider to be overspending by the Democratic majority.
