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205%
Layoffs across the U.S. surged 205% in March when compared with a year earlier, with last month’s 275,240 job cuts fueled by widespread firings engineered by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. reports CBS. March’s layoffs represent the third-highest monthly total ever recorded, Challenger said. The two previous highest monthly totals were recorded in April 2020 and May 2020, when more than 671,000 and 397,000 job cuts, respectively, were recorded, due to the pandemic shuttering the U.S. economy, according to its data.
172,000
The U.S. had ~172,000 layoffs in February, up 245% from January and the most in a single month since the Covid pandemic in 2020, according to a report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That’s also the most job cuts in the month of February since 2009, during the financial crisis. More than a third of those layoffs (~62,000) came from the Department of Government Efficiency’s federal headcount reduction. But it wasn’t just federal workers who were laid off: Retail was also hit hard, losing nearly 40,000 roles. Per CNBC, the sector has lost six times more jobs so far this year than it did in the same period last year.
