Officials with Mayor Eric Adams’ Office of Management and Budget (OMB) insisted that cuts to thousands of vacant positions across the city’s municipal ranks in the Fiscal Year 2024 preliminary budget won’t negatively impact city services during a City Council hearing digging into the spending plan on Monday.
The mayor’s budget director, Jacques Jiha, said in testimony to the council’s Committee on Finance that agencies still have capacity to hire for 23,000 vacant posts across the municipal workforce, even with cuts to 4,000 vacant positions in the current fiscal year and 4,300 in the next. The cuts were implemented through Adams’ November Financial Plan, where he asked agencies to slash their vacant positions by 50% in anticipation of a likely economic downturn.
