Attorney General Phil Weiser Testimony to the Joint Committee on the Judiciary Colorado General Assembly (Jan. 20, 2026)

Chairs Gonzales and Mabrey, and Committee members, thank you for letting me join you today to present the Department of Law’s (“Department”) 2026 priorities, our performance this past year, and our plans for the coming year on how we best serve Colorado. As always, I’m grateful for our continued work together and for our partnership to advance meaningful public policies for our State.

In starting off, each of you were provided in advance of this hearing with electronic copies of our performance plan, departmental regulatory agenda, and budget request, as required by the SMART Act. I’ll be happy to discuss any questions you have on these documents, or on any other matters you wish to raise.

Background on the Department of Law

As there are some new members on this Committee, I’m happy to begin with a brief background on the Department and some of the core responsibilities we perform for the people of Colorado.

We hold a number of statutory functions and duties. As Attorney General, I serve as the Department’s executive director. I also am entrusted with statutory duties to serve as the chief legal counsel for the state, specifically the Executive and Judiciary Branches; to enforce criminal and civil laws of the State; and to bring and defend actions before the courts on behalf of the State.

Chief Legal Representative for the State. In our role as the lawyers for the state, we provide day-to-day legal counsel for all agencies, offices, boards, commissions, and elected and appointed officials within these two branches. I often say that this role is among our most important, and it’s essential that we give the legal advice not that client agencies want to hear, but what they need to hear. This is a principle I take very seriously and impart to all attorneys who work at the Department—and it ensures our clients receive the best legal representation inside and outside of the courtroom. This is also the role in which we are litigators defending laws enacted by the General Assembly when they are challenged in court—a function that has grown considerably in recent years with an increasing volume of lawsuits brought challenging new laws as they take effect.
Public Safety and Criminal Justice. We also perform important functions in advancing public safety. This includes my role as chair of the Peace Officer Standards and Training (“POST”) Board, which ensures that officers are properly trained and certified. Our Criminal Justice Section prosecutes certain crimes directly (including financial crimes) and supports law enforcement agencies throughout the state, regularly providing prosecutorial support to rural district attorney (“DA”) offices when they need special expertise in prosecuting complex cases. And our Criminal Appeals Section represents the State for felony prosecutions when they go on appeal.
Consumer Protection. Another function that is particularly important to me given my background as an antitrust and consumer protection attorney is our work protecting consumers. We bring actions to enforce multiple state laws designed to protect consumers and ensure our marketplace is fair so that good actors can succeed—this includes the Colorado Consumer Protection Act and the State Antitrust Act. As I’ll discuss later on, these are the laws we also use to challenge mergers and enforce state laws to protect renters.
Defending Coloradans’ Rights. And another core role of our Department is defending the legal interests and rights of the people of Colorado and our State’s sovereignty. Part of this function is defending the State’s interests in interstate river compact litigation. It also includes defending reproductive freedoms through the Reproductive Health Equity Act. And, as I’ll discuss in more detail, this work also includes our efforts to stand against illegal actions by the federal government that harm our State, our citizens, and our land, air, and water.

Now I’m happy to dive into specific updates I’d like to brief the Committee on.

Protecting Colorado’s Water

First, I’d like to begin by updating you on our work to protect our water. This resource—without question our most vital natural resource—continues to be under threat. Climate change continues to reduce our snowpack, harming flows throughout all basins; and that’s on top of historic drought conditions.

Presently, we remain in negotiations between the Upper and Lower Basin states on the Colorado River. Time is running short for the states to reach an agreement before the federal government will step in to address the issue. My team is closely engaged with Colorado’s lead negotiator, Becky Mitchell, to support her, ensure Colorado’s long-established rights are protected, and prepare for any possible litigation that may arise.

And, despite our best efforts, we could not dissuade Nebraska from pressing ahead with its plans for the Perkins Canal. We also are now engaged in litigation with Nebraska over its threats to construct this canal (which will require Coloradans’ property) in Northeast Colorado. Last year, I updated you on this risk and the funds that the Nebraska Unicameral dedicated to this effort. As I said then, this project will provide little to no benefit to Nebraska—but if Nebraska continues down this path, I remain prepared to defend our rights under the 1923 agreements. And that’s where we are now. Presently, we are waiting to see whether the U.S. Supreme Court will decide to take up this issue. On each visit I make along the I-76 corridor, I continue to hear from farming communities about their worries. And this is very real for the agricultural landowners who received notices threatening eminent domain proceedings against them. I’m committed to protecting our state and those communities, and to doing our best work to make the case to the Supreme Court why this is a needless pursuit by Nebraska.

As for water quality, we are taking a number of important actions, including suing the manufacturing of PFAS (or “forever chemicals”) that are endangering public health and working to support the implementation of Colorado’s Clean Water Act. Moreover, just last year I led other state attorneys general in support of a lawsuit by Eagle County to protect the Colorado River from a Utah plan to transport by train millions of barrels of waxy crude oil through our state. The issue was a legal dispute led by Eagle County regarding federal environmental laws. My brief to the U.S. Supreme Court made the case that such a huge volume of oil running immediately adjacent to the Colorado River and its headwaters posed a major threat to our most critical water resource, and to Western Slope communities particularly those reliant on agriculture and outdoor recreation. The Court’s decision disappointed us as they sided with the company pushing this risky scheme. Two weeks ago, I weighed in with formal comments to the U.S. Surface Transportation Board as it evaluates the next phase of this plan—because it’s well known that train accidents are real, oil barrels can leak, and trains on tracks cause sparks that lead to fires. Those are very real risks that are too great for us to ignore—just look at the damage that was caused when coal cars recently derailed and crashed into the Gunnison River just upstream of where it joins the Colorado. I’ll continue to press the case against this proposal.

Protecting Public Safety

I mentioned earlier how critical our work is in advancing public safety and improving our criminal justice system. Protecting victims and defending their rights is a top priority for me. This work has led to our investigation of a district attorney who was found to have violated the Victims’ Rights Act protections for victims. That investigation ultimately led to the district attorney’s resignation. And as AG, I also chair the Domestic Violence (“DV”) Fatality Review Board, which reviews DV incidents and develops public policy recommendations to curb such preventable deaths. Many of these recommendations are then incorporated into bills that come before this body.

On the POST Board, we are working hard to better support our peace officers and the communities they serve by redesigning the curriculum for training law enforcement officers at our state’s academies. To that end, the POST Board recently adopted a new Instructor Methodology program, based on the gold standard of active learning, which will result in better preparation for officers and better performance in the field.

We continue to do all we can to best support law enforcement. Officers have an incredibly challenging role and they endure some of the most traumatic situations imaginable. Suicide is a significant problem in the law enforcement community—more officers die by suicide than are killed on the job year after year—and that reflects the extremely challenging situations they encounter and the level of trauma that they experience. That is why several years ago we partnered with the legislature on a bill to expand the State peace officer mental health program. This is an essential program that provides the support peace officers need so they can both take care of their mental health and continue protecting our communities safely and effectively.

Relatedly, I believe it’s important that those peace officers who suffer post-traumatic stress and die by suicide are given benefits equivalent to that of officers who fall while on duty as well. When looking at the trauma experienced by those officers on January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol, for example, that trauma inflicted that day led to more tragic losses by suicide in the following weeks and months than who died in the attack itself. In short, we owe it to those peace officers who die by suicide due to trauma suffered while on duty to treat their families’ losses the same way had they died on the date that caused the trauma itself.

One very important function we have is that our Criminal Justice Section provides assistance to rural DA offices on complex cases. Rural DAs are resource-constrained and have added challenges in prosecutor recruitment. When they encounter complex cases in their jurisdictions, rural DAs may ask us for support from our Special Prosecutions Unit. Recently, we asked for additional FTE to support this work because the need for such support far exceeded the capacity of our Special Prosecutions Unit. I appreciate the support for this request and the lawyers we hired are now providing critical support in rural areas. For a few examples of this work, consider that we are prosecuting homicide cases in Pueblo, handled a child abuse resulting in death case in Cortez, and prosecuted a double-homicide in Delta.

Both the support for officer mental health and our rural prosecution program are very important public safety priorities for Colorado. In these challenging budget times, I know you have difficult decisions ahead and that these modest and impactful investments made to advance public safety in recent years are at risk of being reversed. I strongly urge the legislature to retain these investments for peace officers and our rural communities, and not roll them back. I believe both deliver dividends in the long-term for our State—helping rural communities, supporting law enforcement officer wellness, and facilitating officer retention—that are too great to abandon even during these challenging fiscal times.

Protecting Colorado Tenants and Consumers

As I said earlier, protecting consumers is a top priority for me. The consumer protection laws we have not only safeguard consumers from being taken advantage of and protect their pocketbooks, but they also ensure we have a fair marketplace for those companies who do treat their customers right.

When I took office, our consumer laws were dated and under-enforced. They had not kept pace with the evolving marketplace or the technological age. But in partnering with many of you, we’ve made major progress in updating those laws so we can use them to respond and react to modern risks harming consumers’ pocketbooks. That includes:

the most comprehensive overhaul of the Colorado Consumer Protection Act in decades, brought by Senators Gonzales and Weissman;
a complete rewrite of the State Antitrust Act of 1991;
strengthening our vehicle lemon law, which up until then was noted as one of the weakest in the nation;
capping how much patients’ medical debt interest can grow;
stopping so-called TRAP agreements that left workers on the hook for training fees, championed by Representative Clifford; and
thanks to Senator Gonzales again, creating overdue protections for tenants and new laws protecting people who had their vehicles towed.

One of the most notable consumer actions we took in the last several years was to block the proposed merger between Kroger and Albertsons. The Department investigated this merger and how it would impact customers, food producers, and workers. I also held 19 town halls to learn firsthand what this merger would mean for people and communities. It was very clear that not only would this merger be unlawful, but it would have a devastating impact on communities and people throughout our State. I brought an action to challenge that merger proposal. Since then, after unfavorable decisions by the courts, Kroger and Albertsons abandoned the plan and this merger proposal is no longer a threat. But it’s worth noting that our investigation also revealed something we did not expect—that the two companies had a history of collusion to protect themselves during labor disputes, agreeing that they wouldn’t hire employees or solicit pharmacy customers from one another. That’s the type of conduct that our laws are designed to prohibit, and we’re in the process now of holding both companies accountable for these actions.

And as you all know, the State has made major strides in ensuring that tenants are treated fairly. We’ve used the new authority provided by the General Assembly to stand up a new Fair Housing Unit to increase our enforcement of new housing protection laws. Two months ago, we, along with eight other states, held accountable Greystar Management Services, which is one of the biggest national apartment managers, for artificially driving up rents. Using private data and algorithms to collude to push rents up is violates our antitrust laws, and I’m pleased we were able to put a stop to it and hold Greystar accountable. In late 2024, the Denver Post reported that RealPage’s algorithmic pricing software cost Denver-area tenants an extra $136 each month. That’s over $1,600 per year that unfairly came out of tenants’ pockets. In this time of extreme housing costs, that underscores just how important this work is to ensure that our housing market is fair and tenants aren’t taken advantage of through inflated rents or excessive fees. And we have brought separate cases against Greystar and Four Star Realty for using predatory and hidden “junk fees,” a practice we have also worked to address through legislation last year.

Defending Colorado from Illegal Actions by the Federal Government

Lastly, I’d like to update you on a field of work that has grown dramatically in the last 12 months—protecting our State, our people, and our land, air, and water from illegal actions by the federal government.

Let me being by saying that I’ve often reminded this committee in the past that I will always challenge the federal government when it oversteps, and that whether or not I take that action is always based on two principles—(1) whether our laws were broken; and (2) whether Coloradans or our State were harmed. That has been my guiding principle in whether I bring an action against the federal government on behalf of the State of Colorado—not who is in the White House. That principle guided me when, for example I challenged the first Trump Administration in 2019 by suing the U.S. Department of Justice when it unlawfully withheld law enforcement funds from Colorado sheriffs and police. And it guided me when I opposed the Biden Administration, weighing in at the Supreme Court to support Eagle County to protect the Colorado River, as I discussed earlier.

When I spoke to this Committee last year, we discussed the incoming federal Administration and how that might impact our work, and our plans to protect communities and people fearful they may be targeted. I said then that I couldn’t predict what was to come from the incoming federal Administration, but I was extremely concerned—based on what incoming members of that Administration were saying out loud as well as transition documents made public. What concerned me then was the massive number of concepts previewed that were outside the four corners of our laws and the U.S. Constitution. I’m sorry to say that those concerns were immediately realized ten-fold, and that those who were fearful they may be targeted, were right to be concerned. As we have seen, this Administration has brought a series of actions, many of which are wholly unconstitutional, to target vulnerable communities, immigrants, LGBTQ+ Coloradans, and even the State of Colorado as a whole.

Currently, we have led or joined the State to 51 lawsuits against the Trump Administration, which doesn’t include lawsuits filed by the U.S. Department of Justice against the State of Colorado challenging our state laws on immigration enforcement as it relates, which we are now defending in court. While we don’t have time allotted for me to go into depth on every lawsuit today, there are several in particular that I’d like to highlight that are especially important for our State.

v. Trump, et. al. Last fall, I brought a single-plaintiff lawsuit against the President for his decision to move U.S. Space Command Headquarters (“HQ”) out of Colorado Springs. Our complaint noted that the U.S. Space Command HQ based in Colorado Springs was lawfully sited at Peterson Space Force Base, and that: (1) the President’s decision to relocate it to Alabama bypassed federal statutes governing how military facilities can be relocated; and (2) his decision was unconstitutional as a punitive measure to punish our state for our mail-in voting laws, as he stated himself. The latter is a particularly offensive affront to states’ sovereignty, and is something that should concern us all. Imagine, for example, a Democratic president removing military facilities from an overwhelmingly conservative state because they didn’t like a requirement for voter identification to vote. That precedent of wielding federal actions to punish a state into accepting the President’s preferred style of voting—something the Constitution reserves solely to the states—is not lawful and violates the 10^th Amendment, which protects state sovereignty. But there’s a very real and human element to this case—hundreds of El Paso County civilians work at this facility. They have homes they’ve bought or rented. They have children they’ve chosen schools for. They are our neighbors. And it’s just plain wrong for them to be pawns in a political game and have their lives thrown into uncertainty, uprooting them and their families from their homes and community. That’s why this lawsuit is important.

And as you probably saw, two weeks ago I amended this complaint to add a number of new claims against the federal government—because in December and January, we witnessed a coordinated series of actions by the Administration to punish Colorado for how it administers its criminal justice laws in relation to a single case of interest to them. Like Space Command HQ, it is equally unlawful for the federal government to coerce Colorado into acting how the federal government wants it to act when it comes to our authority to administer our criminal code. That includes, but isn’t limited to, dismantling NCAR, denying FEMA disaster funds, and singling Colorado out to cancel millions of dollars in transportation funds already committed. Our case argues that the President has no legal authority to wield the federal government as a weapon to punish Colorado until it submits to giving up our sovereignty and bending to the wishes of the Administration.

Actions to Protect Coloradans. Other lawsuits we’ve brought are to protect communities targeted by the Administration. The first lawsuit we entered was to protect the constitutional right of birthright citizenship for children born in the United States (J., et al. v. Trump, et al.). We also brought challenges against Secretary Kennedy for acting to withhold Medicaid funds from Colorado hospitals that provide gender-affirming care (Ore., et al. v. Kennedy, et al.), and an executive order directing criminal enforcement for doctors who provide this type of care (Wash., et al. v. Trump, et al.). And we challenged unlawful firings of federal workers who provide critical services to our State, like wildland fire fighters (Md., et al. v. U.S. Dep’t of Agriculture, et al.).
Actions to Protect Funding. Dozens of lawsuits we brought were to challenge federal terminations of dollars committed to Colorado. A commonality in all of these actions is the federal government—no matter the agency making the decision—acted to withhold or impose new requirements to draw down those funds despite having no congressionally-granted authority to do so in the law. And these funds are incredibly important to Coloradans and communities—childcare grants, transportation funds, EV charging infrastructure, CU and CSU medical research dollars, school district funds for youth mental health, and TANF and SNAP benefits for lower income families to purchase food and essentials. This work is critical. As of late December, the Governor’s Office tracker estimated this work as having successfully defended over $850 million for our State. [1]

I’m often asked what the cost of this work is to the Colorado taxpayer. For the first half of last year, we absorbed all of this work within existing resources. We had many dedicated lawyers and staff committed to these lawsuits and putting in the long extra hours to do the work, but that wasn’t a sustainable model to have dozens of staff working over 60 hours each week. And it was clear that the steady stream of unlawful actions was not, and still hasn’t, slowed or tapered off. So last March I submitted a budget request for roughly $600,000 so I could hire a few additional FTE dedicated to this work—given the hundreds of millions, or likely billions, of Colorado dollars at stake, that $600,000 granted by you in the Long Bill, I believe, is a sound investment and one that is having a real impact for Colorado.

I would welcome the opportunity to provide more details on this work. For transparency purposes we have a webpage that provides more information on these lawsuits. I recognize that we have uncertain times ahead. But my Department and I will remain committed to those principles and our duty to defend Coloradans’ fundamental rights and the rule of law.

Conclusion

That concludes the updates I had for you. As always, with the session beginning please know that I and my team are very ready and willing to support you and be a resource on legislation. That’s particularly true as we want to be in the best position possible to defend bills that become laws if and when they are challenged in court.

I’ll also add that I do have a number of legislative priorities that I will be working with many of you on this session. I’m looking forward to partnering with you on advancing our consumer and public safety laws. A point I often say is that I’m very proud that every agenda bill we’ve worked with you on from our Department, since I’ve been in office, has received bipartisan support. That’s a point of pride for our work. Because I believe we do our best work when we do it together and listen to each other.

Before this hearing, you were also provided required statutory reports updating on the work of the Office of Financial Empowerment [2] and implementation of the Nonbank Mortgage Servicers Act. [3] I’m happy to address any questions you have on these items, or any other matters you wish to raise. And as always, thank you for your partnership and service to our State.

[1] https://federalfunds.colorado.gov/federal-funding-cuts-to-colorado (opens new tab)

[2] § 24-31-1102(5), C.R.S.

[3] § 5-21-116, C.R.S.