Juneau Rep. Sara Hannan asked the right question of Adam Crum, who served as the state health commissioner for the last four years.

She wanted to know why he didn’t do anything as health commissioner about the food stamp crisis that has harmed tens of thousands of the most needy Alaskans.

Reporters Claire Stremple of KTOO in Juneau and Annie Berman of the Anchorage Daily News have had good coverage on the problem.

The management failure had been spreading for some time under Crum’s watch, but Crum and the rest of the Dunleavy administration kept it secret until after the election.

Now Gov. Mike Dunleavy has named Crum to lead the revenue department, a position for which Crum does not have the right management experience or the financial training.

Crum claims he brings “stability and managerial expertise” to the revenue department job, but his only real qualification is his allegiance to Dunleavy.

In the only House confirmation hearing that Crum will face, Hannan said that for 82,000 needy Alaskans, Crum left the health department in “shambles” and didn’t do anything about fixing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

“Many of these things you knew ahead of time, yet we never saw any leadership on how to resolve this before it became a crisis and people have been months without SNAP benefits,” she said Monday.

Crum responded to Hannan’s question with hemming and hawing.

He evaded the issue with bureaucratic babbling and jargon, refusing to take any responsibility for the food stamp mess and suggesting the “limited leadership structure” was busy with higher priorities and things got out of control.

“This is not a situation that is taken lightly by myself” or anyone in the Dunleavy administration, he said, explaining that the health commissioner’s job is a hard one.

“There is at any one time five burning fires across the board and how do you triage that? These are vulnerable Alaskans in every capacity,” he said, reciting a laundry list of state programs that people rely on.

“There are pending items at all times. and so being that it’s a limited leadership structure, there’s only so much time in the day to address those. And you typically are moving on a rolling basis.”

He went on for three-and-a-half minutes with jargon and cliches, saying the problem wasn’t easy, that it was a “perfect storm of events” and that “I feel bad for all of the Alaskans that have been left in the lurch like this.”

Tok Republican Rep. Mike Cronk, who is apparently unable to recognize tough questions or lame answers, praised Crum at the hearing for his ability to answer all the tough questions. Cronk didn’t ask Crum any questions.

“You always answer tough questions,” Cronk gushed. “And I really appreciate that because when you falter answering tough questions, when it’s get tough, you might not all be there. I think we joke around, the sooner you figure out how to plant money trees the better off the state’s gonna be. I just appreciate how you answer tough questions and you don’t shy away from those.”

Crum said that as a college football player he was an offensive lineman and he was used to getting hit in the head on every play and having to move ahead.

There were only two tough questions at the hearing, the one from Hannan and one from Anchorage Rep. Andy Josephson. The latter was about the contradiction during the tenure of former Revenue Commissioner Lucinda Mahoney, who pledged to limit Permanent Fund withdrawals as a trustee of the fund, while also pledging as a Dunleavy employee to support the Dunleavy plan to overdraw the permanent fund by $3 billion.

Crum said he didn’t remember any of that because he was too busy in 2021. He should have been paying more attention.

He didn’t answer Josephson’s question either. I’ll deal more with that issue in a future blog post.

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