The White House attempted to discredit the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday, releasing a video that questions the accuracy of the agency’s previous projections on health insurance coverage under Obamacare. Issued as a heated health care debate continues on Capitol Hill, the administration seems to be arguing that because CBO estimates have been off before, there is no reason to trust its recent reports predicting that a Republican-led effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act would have devastating effects. But just 10 seconds into the video, the White House instead managed to strain its credibility with a misspelling of the word “inaccurately.”

Today’s White House hit on the CBO’s accuracy spells inaccurately two different ways. pic.twitter.com/IrTjyM3RSb — Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) July 12, 2017

A short time later, the White House Twitter account deleted the video and re-posted a version with the spelling corrected. The mistake fits a well-documented trend of the administration’s communications team stepping on its own message with embarrassing typos and other blunders and miscues. But the White House doesn’t just need a copy editor. It needs a better argument, too. Republicans ― both in President Donald Trump’s administration and Congress ― have been challenging the CBO’s credibility ever since it first produced estimates showing that Obamacare repeal legislation would mean no insurance for 20 or even 30 million people, depending on the specific bill. CBO’s estimates of the Senate GOP bill, which the chamber’s leaders introduced last month, suggested the number of people without insurance would rise by 22 million. That number has helped to alienate the public ― and it has spooked Republican senators at a time when GOP leaders are a few votes short of the 50 they need to pass a bill. And so the White House, which wants that vote badly, has resumed its campaign against the CBO, using a variety of disingenuous arguments.

The Congressional Budget Office's math doesn't add up.



Faulty Numbers = Faulty Results pic.twitter.com/zdf4bZ01ma — The White House (@WhiteHouse) July 12, 2017

On the most important number, the overall number of people with and without health insurance under Obamacare, CBO was not far off. When the ACA first became law, CBO predicted that, by 2016, the percent of non-elderly Americans without coverage would fall to 7.6 percent. That was before the Supreme Court made the law’s expansion of Medicaid optional ― a decision that nobody (not even the lawsuit’s supporters) expected. If you adjust for the effects of that decision, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities did recently, the initial CBO projection for 2016 becomes 9.4 percent. The actual 2016 rate, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health Insurance Study (NHIS), was 10.4 percent. The CBO and NHIS figures aren’t precisely the same, because everybody who studies the uninsured uses slightly different methods and baselines. But comparisons to other surveys yields basically the same result: CBO didn’t miss by much.

Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images President Barack Obama signs the Affordable Care Act in the East Room of the White House on March 23, 2010.