Layoffs surged to the highest level since the pandemic driven by Donald Trump's cuts to the federal workforce through the Department of Government Efficiency.
Planned job cuts increased 60 percent to 275,240 last month, the highest level since the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in May 2020 and the third-highest monthly total on record, and CNN's Matt Egan marveled at the news.
"A lot going on," Egan said. "Listen, we're talking about 2020-style layoffs, except now it's not being driven by a deadly virus. It's being driven by DOGE. So these numbers come from [global outplacement firm] Challenger, Gray & Christmas, and a few moments ago, they reported that in March, companies and employers announced almost 300,000 layoffs – 275,000 in March. Now that is 200 percent more than March of last year. So for some context on this number, this is the third-highest month of layoffs since Challenger started tracking this in the late 1980s. The only two months that were higher were spring of 2020 during Covid, when lockdowns were shutting everything down."
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"This is announced job cuts by month, and you can see these announcements were relatively low," Egan continued. "There was that bump up in the middle of 2022, but now they're going sharply higher. Now what's really important to stress here is that the vast majority of the layoffs in March were in the federal government, almost 80 percent, and we've seen that so far this year, nearly 280,000 government layoffs. That is way, way more than the same period of last year. This, of course, comes as Elon Musk and DOGE, they try to cut government spending. They're trying to make the government more efficient. Of course, there are economic effects there, right? For federal workers who they may be spending less, they're going on vacation less, they might be struggling to pay some of their debt."
"Look, DOGE was far and away the No. 1 reason for job cuts in March, way more than market reasons or store closures, restructuring, those traditional metrics," he added. "It's not about that right now, it's really about DOGE."