Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is considering reducing the state workforce by up to 15,000 workers in his budget, the largest cut to the government payroll in recent years, two people briefed on the plan said Wednesday night.

The prospective cuts are likely to accompany large reductions in Medicaid and state education spending, those people said, as Mr. Cuomo and his administration seek to close a projected budget gap of more than $9 billion.

But the cuts would represent a substantial downsizing of the state’s workforce, including clerical workers, state troopers and park rangers. And that belt-tightening would almost certainly be accompanied by noticeable reductions in government services, though it is hard to predict where and how much until Mr. Cuomo releases his proposed budget in early February.

Mr. Cuomo has made trimming the state’s far-flung bureaucracy a top priority of his new administration, hoping to reduce costs to taxpayers and root out waste. Along with Medicaid and education spending, money for so-called “state operations,” including payroll, health and pension benefits, is one of the larger portions of spending borne directly by New York taxpayers.

But layoffs of the magnitude the governor is considering are likely to spur a major counterattack from unions that represent state workers, who have in recent years agreed to concessions that would reduce long-term pension costs but sharply resisted calls by Mr. Cuomo’s predecessor, David A. Paterson, to agree to downsizing the state workforce or other cost-saving measures.

Mr. Paterson’s efforts drew a blistering response from two of the state’s most powerful unions, who picketed the Capitol and mobilized their thousands of members to forestall further cuts. The state laid off more than 900 workers on Dec. 31 after a no-layoff pact between the unions and Mr. Paterson expired.

Representatives of those unions have so far held their fire, however, where Mr. Cuomo is concerned, and indicated on Wednesday that they would wait to hear more information before wading in.

“We’re not going to respond to speculation at this point. When he has a proposal to make, we’ll respond to it appropriately,” said Stephen Madarasz, a spokesman for the Civil Services Employees Association. “Abstract numbers without any context don’t tell us very much.”

Mr. Cuomo has already called for a one-year salary freeze for state employees and to shrink the number of state agencies and departments by 20 percent, efforts that could save money over the long term but would most likely have a far lower impact on the bottom line for next fiscal year’s budget. It was not clear whether the reductions being contemplated would be achieved entirely through layoffs or through a mix of layoffs, attrition and early retirement incentives.

The job cuts being considered would be the largest in at least 15 years, potentially even longer, but not unprecedented. The state workforce that is directly controlled by the governor has shrunk from about 174,000 in 1990 to about 132,000 last March, according to statistics from the state Division of the Budget.

The cuts that Mr. Cuomo is contemplating would probably not affect workers at the state’s tangled web of public authorities, which employ additional tens of thousands of workers while raising and spending billions of dollars in revenue outside the control of elected officials.

Mr. Cuomo’s father, former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, undertook steep job cuts in the early 1990’s as the state faced an earlier financial storm. Many of those job cuts, however, were achieved through attrition and early retirement incentives, as well as layoffs.

(Source: NY Times)