[alabastervlog]

They're trying to break large portions of the government. This accomplishes two things:

1) Congress may as well reduce funding for those parts, as their destruction is a fait accompli. This reduces resistance to funding cuts. The order here is dead backwards and the administration's breaking shitloads of laws to make it happen, but if they move faster than the system can respond, legal and illegal are just words.

2) Turn the bureaucracy into something that is responsive to commands from a President exerting absolute control over the executive branch (this is not, traditionally, how that office works—it has, previously, been more or less bound by the law, with gross violations occurring, but as the exception, not the norm)

This was the stated plan up front and they're plainly executing on it with vigor. A hundred voices were saying "this is what we plan to do" and even "here's where you go sign up to join the effort as staffers of these newly-broken agencies" and only the official line denied it, even as those hundred voices were all lined up to go to the White House in prominent posts, making the denials literally incredible.