However, layoffs have rarely materialized in practice. The last time any significant number of city workers were cut loose was in 2012, and the Citizens Budget Commission estimates the total number was less than 1,000. Instead, unions and the city’s Office of Labor Relations have tended to land upon a variety of strategies to trim costs.

New York City turns over about 22,000 jobs a year through attrition, according to an analysis this month by the Citizens Budget Commission, a business-funded fiscal watchdog. If the city eliminated just 7,000 of those jobs each year, it could save about $1 billion through 2022, according to the commission’s calculations. Other cuts to programs and savings, such as consolidation of city procurement practices and employee welfare funds, could save hundreds of millions of dollars more, it reported.

Looking to cut another $1 billion from the budget, Mr. de Blasio said the staffing reductions would happen in the fall and be across every city agency, including his own office.

There are currently more than 326,000 city employees, according to the Citizens’ Budget Commission

As the pandemic has continued to paralyze New York’s economy, the administration’s estimates of its own budget shortfalls have continued to rise, forcing the city to plan for spending cuts in numerous areas. The mayor said the administration was now looking for another $1 billion in savings.

Mr. de Blasio said he was talking with municipal labor unions in the hope of finding savings that would forestall layoffs from a city work force that numbered 326,000 by the end of 2019, according to the Citizens Budget Commission.

The Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit fiscal watchdog, is calling this the city’s “most severe fiscal crisis in generations.”

And to address that crisis, CBC recently released a report, “Hard Choices That Can Balance New York City’s Budget,” which includes a series of concrete proposals aimed at mitigating harm to New Yorkers and maintaining the city’s competitiveness while balancing the budget.

“If city leaders make the right hard choices, we can manage to close the budget gap without layoffs and without borrowing,” said Andrew Rein, the president of CBC, in an interview. “City leaders need to start now,” he added, but “addressing the crisis is doable.”

“Part of our concern is when you have a crisis like this it’s multi-year impacts and it takes a while to recover,” said Ana Champeny, CBC’s director of city studies and author of the new report. “The city needs to be thinking long-term.”

When Mayor Bill de Blasio released his executive budget plan in April, his administration expected revenue to fall by $5.3 billion in the next fiscal year, and put forth a tenuous plan to balance the budget based on that projection. But a month later, in the mayor’s annual revenue letter to the City Council, the administration projected another $1.6 billion in lost revenue for fiscal year 2021, with the gap then totaling $6.9 billion. The CBC report addresses how the city can rebalance the budget after this downward revision of the revenue forecast.

Most advocates pushing for defunding cite the approximately $6 billion allocated to the NYPD in the New York City fiscal budget. That number, according to the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), doesn’t actually account for the total cost of the agency, because it doesn’t include fringe benefits for employees, such as pensions and health insurance. Ana Champeny, Director of City Studies at the CBC, says the real number is closer to $11 billion.

Either number makes the NYPD the most expensive police department in the United States, by far. Officially, the NYPD has the third largest chunk of funding of any agency in the city, after the Department of Education and the Department of Social Services—but the latter agency’s budget is inflated by its payment of the city’s Medicaid tab.

The deficit is largely from the new coronavirus pandemic, which devastated the economy. The city has more than 17,000 confirmed virus-related deaths. It also lost some 885,000 private-sector jobs in April, its largest decline in history, according to the state Department of Labor.

The Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan fiscal watchdog, has recommended against enacting Mr. de Blasio’s proposal. In a report released earlier this month, the organization suggested belt-tightening measures as an alternative, including shrinking the city’s workforce through attrition, selling off some city assets and putting in place a small and temporary increase in taxes.

Mr. de Blasio said he didn’t agree with the commission’s suggestions, calling them too austere.

The city spends about $11 billion a year on its police, when benefits, pensions and equipment are added to its $5.6 billion operating budget, according to the business-funded Citizens Budget Commission, a non-partisan fiscal watchdog group. That’s a 34% increase since 2010, accounting for 61% of the city’s spending growth during the decade, it found.

The Citizens Budget Commission June 10 proposed the city balance its budget by reducing headcount by 11,000, including 1,174 jobs in the NYPD over the next two years. The business-backed think-tank also recommended a temporary 2-percent property-tax hike.

The Mayor and City Council are required to enact a new budget by July 1. The stimulus bill aiding states and localities has stalled in the U.S. Senate, with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell saying his Republican conference would not consider it until late summer.

CBC President Andrew Rein said in a statement, "New York should receive but cannot wait around for a large Federal aid package. It swiftly should reduce spending, shrink the workforce through attrition, and collaborate with labor to identify and implement savings."

Plus, he wants Albany to let him borrow $7.4 billion to cover expenses — precisely the kind of thing that led Gotham to near-bankruptcy in the ’70s. Fiscal watchdogs are stunned: The city hasn’t taken “sufficient action to reduce expenditures, which is necessary before borrowing,” cautions Citizens Budget Commission President Andrew Rein. The group just released several better ideas to stem the bleeding:

• Trim the municipal workforce by 9,000 positions, leaving it still larger than before the financial collapse of 2008 and saving nearly $1 billion a year.

• Ask employees to chip in more for their health care and to ease work rules.

•  Use more general reserve funds to close out-year gaps.

The Cuomo administration didn’t immediately provide figures on how much money could be withheld statewide. Local police often receive state grants for specific programs rather than a general grant, an analyst said.

For example, the New York Police Department gets 2% of its funding from the state, according to the Citizens Budget Commission.

"The financial impacts on the state and local governments is deeply concerning," said David Friedfel of the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission. "Now is the time for the state and local governments to take decisive action to slow spending. Hopefully, as different regions of the state enter new phases of reopening, sales tax collections will begin to bounce back."