Mayor Eric Adams' Preliminary Budget, released in February, included a Program to Eliminate the Gap (PEG) with approximately $1 billion in annually recurring savings. About 24 percent of those savings came from eliminating 7,026 vacant full-time positions at 42 agencies.¹  CBC applauded “reducing unneeded vacant positions to realize recurring savings” as one of the budget’s “important, welcome, and refreshing initial steps in the right direction.”²

However, in April 2022, Mayor Adams’ Executive Budget added 3,011 positions in fiscal year 2023 (2,892 full-time and 119 full-time equivalents). These, plus the 1,843 positions added outside of the PEG in the Preliminary Budget, effectively reverses 69 percent of the February PEG reductions.³Overall, the plans decrease total authorized City headcount just 0.65 percent, from 334,369 in November 2021 to 332,197 in April 2022.

While the Executive Budget added positions in 30 agencies, more than two-thirds of the new positions were in just six agencies. (See Table 1.) The largest increase, 774 positions, was at the Department of Parks and Recreation, followed by 577 positions at the Department of Correction, and 274 positions at the City Council.

In 18,000 Vacant City Jobs Is More Than Enough, CBC found that the vacancy elimination should not constrain City hiring since there still were ample vacant positions and most agencies had vacancy rates of 5 percent or higher.⁴ Instead, the City’s processes for managing vacancies, recruiting staff, and hiring, coupled with a bureaucratic civil service process, were impediments to filling vacant positions in priority areas.

Rather than add positions, the City should redistribute available vacancies across departments, within agencies, or across agencies. Furthermore, until the City reduces managerial and procedural roadblocks to hiring, City agencies may struggle to fill priority vacancies.