The Fiscal Year 2023 Preliminary Budget Program to Eliminate the Gap (PEG) eliminated 7,026 vacant full-time positions across 42 agencies, saving approximately $290 million annually. This reduction has led some to be concerned that City agencies are short staffed. This concern is misplaced. The City’s staffing challenges are not caused by too few vacancies; even after the PEG, the City could hire more than 18,000 full-time employees, plus thousands more in part-time positions.

Any staffing issues are the result of management, system, and labor market challenges, not a shortage of available positions. To ensure agencies can staff programs sufficiently to deliver results, the City should increase the flexibility of its systems that control, allocate, and reallocate headcount; and improve the systems it uses to control and manage hiring and to administer the civil service system.

The City Will Continue to Have Over 18,000 Vacant Full Time Positions, and a Near Record Allowable Headcount

Even after the PEG, the City’s authorized full-time headcount would allow the City to hire at record levels through fiscal year 2025, above the fiscal year 2020 peak of 300,446 onboard full-time staff.¹ (See Figure 1; this analysis considers only full-time, not part-time, positions.) Full-time authorized levels are 306,291 for fiscal year 2022 and 302,600 for fiscal year 2023. In fiscal years 2024 to 2026, the City will have an average of 302,667 authorized full-time positions.²

Based on December 2021 on-board staff and the authorized level in November 2021, the City had 25,944 vacant full-time positions. The PEG and other changes to authorized headcount reduced this to 22,376 positions that could be filled this fiscal year, resulting in a vacancy rate of 7.3 percent. With the authorized full-time headcount in fiscal year 2023 already set to decline to 302,600, based on the most recent onboard staffing data from December 2021, the City would start the year with about 18,685 vacant full-time positions, a 6.2 percent vacancy rate.³

Most Agencies Have Adequate Vacancies

While vacancy rates vary widely, most agencies currently have vacancy rates exceeding 5 percent, sufficient to staff priority functions.⁴ (See Table 1 at the end.) Excluding the eight agencies with headcount at or above authorized levels, agency vacancy rates range from 2.0 percent to 37.5 percent at the Board of Correction (12 positions); among agencies with over 1,000 full-time staff, the vacancy rate is highest at the Department of Buildings (23.4 percent, 473 positions) and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (17.7 percent, 1,093 positions). Fifty-five agencies’ rates are more than 5 percent, and 38 agencies are above 10 percent. Only 8 agencies have vacancy rates between 2 percent and 5 percent.

Among larger agencies, vacancy rates are 9.0 percent at the Department of Education (12,717 positions), 9.2 percent at the Department of Transportation (507 positions), and 13.4 percent at the Department of Housing and Preservation (353 vacancies) and the Department of Social Services (1,745 positions). The uniformed agencies have lower vacancy rates, in part due to hiring uniformed employees in classes. Employment at the Department of Sanitation is 3.2 percent over authorized levels (299 positions), but vacancy rates are 2.1 percent at the Fire Department (360 positions), 2.8 percent at the Police Department (1,410 positions), and 3.9 percent at the Department of Correction (368 positions).

While most agencies have sufficient vacancies, three agencies may face challenges unless City systems are improved to be more flexible and efficient.

• The City University of New York has only 11 vacant full-time pedagogical positions (0.3 percent), despite an overall vacancy rate of 2.2 percent. However, CUNY often uses part-time adjuncts to teach courses and may have sufficient part-time vacancies;
• The Department of Sanitation has more on-board uniformed employees than authorized and will need to reduce headcount through attrition to meet the lower authorized level;⁵ and
• The Department of Correction exceeds the number of authorized uniformed employees, largely due to staffing needed to address the extraordinary number of on-board employees unavailable for work.⁶

More Flexibility in Managing Vacancies and Better Hiring Management are the Solutions

The City as a whole, and most agencies individually, has sufficient vacant positions to hire in priority areas. Still, there are units and perhaps agencies that should have more full-time staff on board. This should be solved not by creating and funding unneeded additional vacant positions, but rather by improving how the City allocates positions and manages agency personnel and hiring.

Providing greater flexibility to allocate and reallocate headcount to better align vacancies with priorities could make the City nimbler in responding to staffing needs and labor availability. The current systems are inflexible and cumbersome, and are better at facilitating control than hiring. Vacant positions are not easily moved across functions within agencies, let alone between agencies. Greater flexibility—to move headcount across agencies, within agencies across units or to allocate vacancies agency-wide—would improve the ability to hire priority staff.

Improving recruitment and hiring systems and processes could reduce the time to fill positions, thereby increasing the number of on-board staff, and perhaps eliminating the slowness that commonly is thought to discourage some from working for the City. Many offices, within and outside service-providing agencies, are involved in multiple steps in the hiring process, including posting open positions, making offers, approving salary levels, and setting start dates. Speeding the process is especially important in the current competitive job market.

Ensuring adequate, timely civil service tests and lists also will speed hiring and encourage more to seek City employment. Compounding historical challenges, in-person civil service testing was paused during the pandemic and titles may not have active lists with enough candidates at this time. Furthermore, the time between administering tests and certifying civil service lists is very long; in the first four months of fiscal year 2022, the median time between exam administration and results was 246 days (though still below the City’s target of 290 days).⁷ DCAS should seek to leverage technology and other process reforms to speed up the process.

Conclusion

A focus on eliminating a small share of vacant positions from authorized headcount misses the real challenge the City faces in staffing priority activities—rigid headcount management and time-consuming hiring processes. The City has the authorized headcount and budget to fill nearly 19,000 vacant full-time positions and most agencies have vacancy rates over 5 percent. Increasing authorized headcount will not increase on-board staff; increasing flexibility and improving systems will.