Witness Shuts Down Lauren Boebert in Dispute Over Funding: ‘That’s a Math Problem’

Oren “Hank” McKnelly, an executive counselor at the Social Security Administration, deftly shut down Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) during a hearing on Wednesday in an exchange over the funding of his agency.

McKnelly testified before the House Oversight Committee in a hearing titled, “Oversight of Federal Agencies’ Post-Pandemic Telework Policies,” and was questioned by Boebert who took a combative approach regarding work-from-home policies.

“You all are allowing delinquent employees to sit on their sofas at home and instead of actually getting to work and doing their jobs. This is absolutely unacceptable,” Boebert began.

After a bit of a back and forth, McKnelly gave a lengthy defense of his employees’ efficiency and how they are monitored:

So our employees are subject to the same performance management processes and oversight they are, whether they’re teleworking or working in the office, and we have systems in place that our managers use to schedule, assign, and track workloads, and that includes individual employee workloads in many cases.

So real time understanding of what actions are being processed at any particular given time. Additionally, our employees are required to be accessible to their supervisors, clients, colleagues, and external parties during work hours for a variety of means, including instant messaging, video platforms, and telephone. They are connected to the workplace, whether they are in the office or at the home.

“Then why is the backlogs for Social Security applicants increased from 41,000 to 107,000?” Boebert shot back.

“Because we’ve been historically underfunded for a number of years now,” McKnelly replied.

“I don’t think you’re underfunded. You’re funded at the Nancy Pelosi levels, at the democrat levels. We just continued that same funding,” Boebert hit back.

“So I’d say we’d have an increase of over 8 million beneficiaries over the last 10 years. At the same time, we experienced our lowest work staffing levels at the end of FY 22. That’s a math problem. I mean, that is a problem if you have those workloads increasing and you don’t have the staff to take care of those workloads. You’re going to have the backlogs that you’re talking about, Representative,” McNelly replied.

Watch the full clip above via C-SPAN.