The best euphemism of the day belongs to the watchdog, not the press. The Government Accountability Office published a report on Thursday finding that the Department of Government Efficiency claimed $1.7 billion in savings on a Defense Health Agency contract where, in GAO's words, "no savings were achieved" — because the contract was never actually terminated or reduced. The title on the front of that report: "DOGE Wall of Receipts: More Transparency Needed on How Savings Are Derived from Contract, Grant, and Lease Terminations." More transparency needed. As if someone had misplaced a spreadsheet. * Background in one sentence: GAO examined the $110 billion in contract, grant and lease savings DOGE posted to its public "Wall of Receipts" between January 2025 and July 2026, and reported that it could not verify the method behind 96% of the claimed grant savings, that 108 of 264 terminated leases were already being wound up before DOGE existed, and that more than half the listed contracts were either not ended or impossible to check. * The Washington Post picked up the bureaucratic peg and kept it: "Elon Musk's DOGE made big errors in claims of government savings, GAO finds." Errors. That is the word for a maths slip, a transposed digit, a column that doesn't add. It's what you say about a receipt. GAO's problem with most of this material was not that the arithmetic was wrong — it's that there was nothing behind it to check the arithmetic against. "Big errors" describes a bad calculation. "We asked how you got this number and nobody answered" describes something else, and the report says DOGE officials did not respond to GAO's requests for more information. * CNN was blunter where it counts, in the headline: "DOGE claims of saving $110 billion are incorrect and unreliable, watchdog says." Unreliable is doing honest work there — it's the difference between a wrong answer and an answer you can't grade. * And give CNN this, since we spent yesterday's piece complaining about outlets that skip the awkward line: its story tells you that "several media organizations, including CNN, also found notable errors on DOGE's site." One clause, no drama, and now you know the newsroom has been in this story before. It costs nothing to write and it is the whole difference between reporting and posturing. * Then there's the coverage you can't quote, because it isn't there. As of Thursday evening, Fox News Digital's politics feed had no story on the GAO report. What it did have, filed in the same afternoon: Zohran Mamdani being booed on Staten Island, four separate times, under four slightly different headlines. Also Fauci held in contempt, twice. A watchdog telling the public that a flagship cost-cutting programme could not document most of what it claimed to have saved did not make the list — during the same hours the same feed found room to run one booing four ways. * Here's the figure that stayed out of every headline we read: 96%. That's the share of DOGE-reported grant savings whose method GAO could not verify at all. It's a cleaner number than "big errors" and it's shorter than "incorrect and unreliable." A story about unverifiable numbers got told, almost everywhere, in adjectives.