Lauren Boebert 'Torched' During Clash With Social Security Official

Rep. Lauren Boebert's attempt to argue with a Social Security Administration official about employee productivity during a hearing backfired.

The Colorado Republican took aim at the agency's teleworking policies during the House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday.

She told Oren "Hank" McKnelly, an executive counselor for the SSA, that the agency was allowing "delinquent employees to sit on their sofas at home instead of actually getting to work and doing their jobs."

Boebert added: "This is absolutely unacceptable."

McKnelly swiftly responded that SSA employees "are working whether they are in the office or at home."

After Boebert interrupted to ask if employees working from home were being monitored, McKnelly said they were.

"Our employees are subject to the same performance management processes and oversight they are whether they're teleworking or working in an office and we have systems in place that our managers use to schedule, assign and track workloads," he said.

"And that includes individual employee workloads in many cases, so real time understanding of what actions are being processed at any particular given time."

He also noted that employees working from home must also be accessible to supervisors, clients, colleagues and others through various forms of communication.

Boebert pressed on. "Then why is the backlog for Social Security applicants increased from 41,000 to 107 hundred thousand?" she said, apparently referring to data showing that over 1 million Americans are waiting on the SSA to process their disability claims and that wait times are at an all-time high.

"Because we've been historically underfunded for a number of years now," McKnelly said.

Boebert quickly disagreed, telling McKnelly: "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... at pandemic-level spending."

McKnelly then said that the SSA has seen an increase of more than 8 million beneficiaries over the past 10 years and experienced the lowest work staffing levels ever at the end of fiscal 2022.

"That's a math problem," he said. "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."

Newsweek has contacted Boebert's office for comment via email.

The Social Security Administration has come under strong criticism recently from both sides of the aisle over backlogs and its treatment of customers. Republican Representative Drew Ferguson, chairman of the Social Security panel of the House Committee on Way and Means, has called the consequences of the SSA issues "devastating."

A clip of Wednesday's exchange went viral after it was posted on X, formerly Twitter, by @acyn, a senior digital editor for the liberal outlet Meidas Touch.

"Wow this backfired for Boebert," the post said.

Others also commented that Boebert came off worse in the exchange.

"Please watch Lauren Boebert get torched by a Social Security Administration official after she calls agency employees lazy," Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett wrote.

"He uses her dumb question to highlight GOP slashing the Social Security budget."

Another person wrote: "My God, how is anyone this ignorant and just plain stupid? How many times has Lauren Boebert self-owned herself? These people live in a world devoid of facts and logic."

Meanwhile, Democrat Adam Frisch, who is running against Boebert again after almost unseating her in last year's midterm elections, wrote: "Lauren Boebert doesn't know what she's doing and Coloradans deserve better. Help me take her job."