Amazon HQ2 was supposed to add jobs last year. It shed them instead.

Amazon has fallen so far behind schedule in creating new jobs at its Northern Virginia headquarters that its workforce at those offices shrank last year, the company confirmed, showing how the project that it had pitched as an economic jolt is instead hitting a slowdown.

Following a much-hyped sweepstakes across North America, the tech giant in 2018 made a deal with Virginia officials to locate half of its second headquarters in Arlington, just outside D.C.: In exchange for as much as $750 million in taxpayer subsidies from the commonwealth, it agreed to build a massive new campus near the Pentagon and fill it with tens of thousands of new employees.