The accounting really was unreliable, and that deserves to be said plainly. An August 2026 U.S. Government Accountability Office review (GAO-26-108615) found that DOGE overstated the savings on its public "Wall of Receipts" by $81.1 million on real-property lease terminations alone — reporting about $113 million in savings on leases GAO estimated were worth about $31.8 million. GAO could reconcile DOGE's stated savings methodology for only about 27.5% of the contract savings it examined; for most of the rest it either found other calculations or could not determine how DOGE arrived at the number. In one striking case, DOGE kept reporting more than $1.7 billion in savings on a Defense Health Agency IT contract that it had in fact agreed not to terminate — so no savings were ever achieved. Anyone treating the headline savings figure as a hard, audited number is making a mistake, and that is a fair, well-evidenced criticism. Where "fabricated" overreaches is on intent. Fabricated implies deliberate invention; GAO documented overstatements, unreconcilable figures and poor documentation, but for most of the savings it examined it could not determine how DOGE calculated the figures — in part because DOGE did not answer GAO's requests for clarification — so a knowing, deliberate lie is not what the audit establishes, and some of the underlying cuts and cancellations were real. The defensible position is not that DOGE saved what it claimed (it clearly did not) but that "fabricated" asserts an intent the audit did not establish. Verdict: misleading — the savings figures are genuinely unreliable and badly overstated, which is a legitimate and serious criticism; "fabricated" asserts a deliberate deception the audit did not establish.