Luis Cano, Chief Information Officer of the U.S. Census Bureau, has announced his retirement from federal service, effective April 30, 2025. The announcement marks the close of a distinguished public service career spanning more than four decades across the U.S. Navy, the National Weather Service (NWS), and the Census Bureau.
“After over 40 years of dedicated federal service, the time has come for me to embark on a new chapter: retirement on April 30th,” Cano shared in a heartfelt LinkedIn post. “I started my journey fresh out of high school, joining the Navy and serving as a radioman, where I gained invaluable technical skills and a wealth of life experiences.”
Following his military service, Cano transitioned into civil service, beginning his career with NAVTASC and then devoting nearly 24 years to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) NWS. There, he held a variety of senior leadership roles with increasing responsibility. As Director for the Office of Dissemination, he was responsible for modernizing and delivering to improve dissemination services in support of NWS’s mission of protecting life and property. He also managed NOAA’s Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System (WCOSS), overseeing the acquisition and implementation of supercomputers essential for running environmental prediction models used for forecasting and warnings.
Cano brought this technical and executive leadership expertise to the U.S. Census Bureau in 2017, where he served as Chief of the Decennial Contracts Execution Office (DCEO) during the 2020 Census. In this role, he managed more than $3 billion in contracts supporting the successful execution of the most technologically advanced Census in U.S. history. His oversight spanned executing the contracts for cloud and on-premise infrastructure, field operations equipment, secure data processing systems, and support for hundreds of thousands of field workers.
In 2021, Cano was appointed Chief Information Officer of the Census Bureau, where he has helped shape the Bureau’s modernization initiatives through providing secure and robust technology. As CIO, he has led the transformation of the Bureau’s technology strategy and workforce, aligning IT operations with the agency’s mission needs. He’s played a pivotal role in advancing secure, scalable, and efficient systems across the Bureau’s many data collection programs, enabling the delivery of timely and accurate statistics on the nation’s people, places, and economy.
Cano holds a bachelor’s degree in computer and information science and a master’s in technology management from the University of Maryland Global Campus. He is also a certified Project Management Professional and holds a Federal Acquisition Certification for Program and Project Managers (FAC-P/PM) Level III, along with a CIO executive certificate.
Looking ahead, Cano expressed excitement about the future: “I might be retiring, but I’m far from finished—there’s still plenty more I want to accomplish.”