No, they can't. Organizations don't work that way. People don't show up to work literally doing nothing, they have some kind of workload that will go belly-up if they just don't show up the next day.
Yes, many organizations could be made much more efficient, through restructuring, automation, flatter management structures, etc. But it doesn't happen overnight, and if you try to make it happen overnight, then a lot of the workload just ends up being forgotten about until the customer steps in the door and reminds you in such a way that it becomes critical. Trying to reduce the size of a company needs to be carefully planned and executed over time to do so without affecting operations.
Large sudden layoffs, which is to say large layoffs which need to be executed quickly, mean that the company doesn't care about the hit to operations, which means that there are cash flow problems or worse.
