Here's the situation:
I work in a team of 12 people, responsible for two applications. Our project manager has been working on one of the applications for over 5 years (project A), while the other project has only been ongoing for a year (project B). I am responsible for testing, release management and general communication with the business on project A.
For the past year, our project manager hasn't really been actively involved in my project. He stopped going to our application meetings, and generally doesn't seem to care about incidents or escalated problems.
Lately we've been having a big staffing problem on project A. Project A is understaffed because we've lost some developers and testers because of budget cuts, a problem which I have already mentioned and officially escalated to our PM several times. Yet he keeps asking developers responsible for A to work on project B. This has created a work environment where both the lead developer and me are overworked and overstressed.
I've confronted him about this several weeks ago, and he told me (and the rest of the team in earshot) that he was "working" on the staffing problem, and that it would be solved "soon".
Here's my question: He has been known to lie about "working on" or "handling" things, and I would like to ask him, in a one-to-one meeting, what he has effectively done when he says he's "working on" the problem. Is it ok to do that? Is there another way to mitigate this situation?