The new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already trimmed an eye-catching $160 billion in spending and shed 20,000 federal jobs in its first hundred days Business Insider. From the outside, that looks like victory: one real-time dashboard, every penny under surveillance, maximum “transparency.”
But transparency cuts both ways. What Sun Tzu calls deception we might call strategic opacity—the deliberate refusal to show an adversary your full hand. By collapsing thousands of moving parts into a single pane of glass, DOGE risks exchanging messy complexity (your natural “fog of war”) for machine-perfect predictability.
Why “waste” sometimes saves you
| Traditional bureaucracy | DOGE’s streamlined model |
|---|---|
| Redundant forms, parallel chains of approval | One unified data lake |
| Dozens of accounting silos | Single financial ledger |
| Slow, sometimes contradictory audits | Continuous automated monitoring |
Those left-hand boxes look like waste—until you remember that waste is also noise. Noise forces any would-be saboteur to navigate conflicting ledgers, regional quirks, arcane sign-offs, and paper trails that don’t line up. It is, in Sun Tzu’s language, the shifting terrain that keeps an attacker guessing.
Remove that terrain and an adversary (external hacker, insider threat, or hostile political appointee) needs only one credentialed seat at the DOGE console to map every vulnerability in real time. You have created a perfect target: “the single screen that rules them all.” The moat of uncertainty is drained; the castle wall is smooth and predictable.
The Art-of-War lens on hyper-efficiency
-
“Know your enemy, know yourself.” If the enemy can know you—because your full ledger is searchable in milliseconds—your advantage dissolves.
-
“Attack him where he is unprepared.” A universal dashboard tells attackers exactly where you are prepared, and by exclusion, where you aren’t.
-
“Appear where you are not expected.” Bureaucratic sprawl, for all its flaws, keeps adversaries from knowing where money, talent, or authority will surface next. That uncertainty is its own deterrent.
A balanced doctrine: keep the moat, trim the fat
-
Segment the dashboards. Give auditors micro-views instead of God-mode; force cross-checks between partially blinded teams.
-
Inject “dummy noise.” Randomized transaction IDs, delayed postings, and decoy accounts can restore uncertainty without reviving true waste.
-
Independent red-team desks. Task outsiders with attacking the system continually; every successful breach triggers an intentional shuffle of internal processes.
-
Manual back-channels for critical disbursements. A paper-only trail for the genuinely mission-critical 1 % denies a bad actor total coverage.
Efficiency should target duplication, not diversity. Sun Tzu didn’t argue for chaos; he argued for controlled ambiguity—a posture that forces opponents to over-extend while you retain freedom of maneuver.
Bottom line
DOGE’s headline numbers prove that fat can be cut. But in the Sun Tzu frame, perfect clarity is perfect vulnerability. Before we celebrate the single screen, we ought to make sure we haven’t handed an enemy the master key.