tenure as OMB Director there was a dramatic expansion in the deficit as a result of both spending increases and tax cuts. The deficits were unusually high for a period of economic expansion. Manipulated unemployment numbers claim In March 2017, Mulvaney said he believed that "the Obama administration was manipulating the numbers, in terms of the number of people in the workforce, to make the unemployment rate—that percentage rate—look smaller than it actually was," and that "[w]hat you should really look at is the number of jobs created." There is no evidence that jobs numbers under the Obama administration were manipulated. FiveThirtyEights Ben Casselman noted that "manipulating the jobs figures... would mean not just messing with one number but rather interfering with an entire ecosystem of statistics [and] would require a conspiracy theory of massive proportions, involving hundreds if not thousands of people." Criticism of the Congressional Budget Office In March 2017, Mulvaney said the Congressional Budget Office was not capable of assessing the American Health Care Act, stating that "[i]f the CBO was right about Obamacare to begin with, there'd be eight million more people on Obamacare today than there actually are." According to FactCheck.Org, "[t]he CBO actually nailed the overall impact of the law on the uninsured pretty closely... It's true (as Trump administration officials have repeatedly pointed out) that CBO greatly overestimated the number who would get government-subsidized coverage through the new insurance exchanges. But at the same time, CBO underestimated the number who would get coverage through expanding Medicaid. And whatever the failings of CBO's predictions, they were closer to the mark than those of the Obama administration and some other prominent forecasters." PolitiFact noted that "the initial CBO analysis of the Affordable Care Act did forecast that more people would participate in health care exchanges than actually did, but the CBO has revised those estimates. Moreover, independent analyses, as well as experts agree that the CBO offers some of the best estimates given the information available at the time." In May 2017, Mulvaney was critical of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) after it estimated the version of the American Health Care Act passed by the house in May 2017 would result in 23 million fewer people with health insurance. Mulvaney said the CBO's assessment was "absurd" and that "the days of relying on some nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to do that work for us has