Governor Orders Departments to Freeze Hiring, Salary Increases – and Reduce Budgets by 5%

In the latest acknowledgment that the long-anticipated ‘fiscal cliff’ is coming, the Murphy administration, in an email sent last week, notified the heads of all the cabinet departments that the state will pause approvals for discretionary salary increases and that each department should limit new hire requests to those that are “mission critical” to the functioning of the department, ROI-NJ has exclusively learned.