Economics
States, Cities Cut Payrolls by Nearly 1 Million Over Shutdown
- Governments facing massive budget gaps as taxes disappear
- Local governments cut about 332,000 jobs outside education
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U.S. states and cities cut their payrolls steeply as the broad shutdown of the economy decimated tax collections, threatening to push them into the worst fiscal crisis in decades.
The number of state and local government jobs fell by 981,000 to 18.9 million in April, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Friday. The drop, while small compared with the nearly 20 million private sector jobs lost last month, is significant because governments didn’t start laying off employees until well after the onset of the last recession.