Not disagreeing, but I'm assuming they did it this way because they wanted some quick and objective way to make the cuts. Given those priorities, what's the best way to accomplish that?
Correct approach would be understand why there are so many people, figure out what is their job and then start removing those who are deemed unnecessary.
i.e. Imagine that you would come to new codebase and start throwing out code which does not appears to do anything and then be surprised that it is not possible to compile or you can't deploy or whole application will start crashing at random intervals.