“It’s a good step. Funding vacant positions and unnecessary positions isn’t helping,” said Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission. The watchdog group holds the position that the city should focus on filing critical vacancies and eliminate unnecessary ones. “This starts to give more realism to the budgets,” Rein said.

Asked about the latest spending cuts, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams expressed some hesitation. “We’re scrutinizing it right now, but the city can’t afford to lose staff in those agencies that really are relied upon to address the multiple crises we’re facing,” she said Tuesday.

New York City Comptroller Brad Lander expressed concern too. “While we agree that savings are critical as New York City faces economic headwinds, confronting those risks cannot come at the expense of diminishing the city’s capacity to get stuff done,” Lander said in a statement on Monday. “Today’s directive to agencies furthers our concerns about recruiting and retaining the staff needed to implement critical programs from traffic safety improvements to processing housing applications.”

Where there’s more widespread agreement is in the opinion that the city needs to step up its hiring efforts for the vacant positions that remain on the books as staffing shortages threaten the delivery of key city services and leave some existing employees overworked. “Allowing agencies to hire for vital positions is crucial,” Rein said. “These hiring systems are sticky. They make it hard to hire, and that needs to be reformed.”

Jiha’s letter includes a policy change that Rein said is a first step to removing some barriers to hiring. The so-called 2 for 1 rule – a policy that generally redistricted departments to hiring one position for every two that are vacated – is being lifted, and the letter said the the Office of Management and Budget is “committed to reviewing and approving new hire requests quickly and efficiently.”