The sell is to individuals to get their votes, not corporations (who of course are on board, but cannot vote), and more amorphous for not being above board. About how people's hardship are being caused by "enemies" who must be punished. Thus the "cruelty is the point" observation.

Simply stating their goal, "the hyper rich feel too fettered, with respect to the rights/safety/wellbeing of individuals", would fail for being overly direct and honest.

(I have no doubt there is governmental waste. But their behavior is not consistent with doing the work of identifying and eliminating waste. Waste elmination here is a side effect (that can be pointed to) of mass elmination independent of waste.)

Dissolving agencies is easy. Push the legislation through congress. The republicans hold control of the legislature, have the ability to blackmail their caucus through the oligarchs, and have a supreme court that has dropped all pretense of legitimacy.

The budget bill devastates things like Medicaid, but doesn't dissolve the department of education.

Straight to ad hominem. Excellent.

You don’t get to hide behind high minded ideals.

I am hardly advocating for destruction of the USA simply because I disagree with that pithy quotable, "The cruelty is the point."

But cruelty to these employees is just the side benefit, the cherry on top. It's not the main objective driving these decisions.

I'm going with deceptive.

If there's a free and authoritative easy way to file taxes, then there's no reason for people to pay for unnecessary third party services who earn ALL their money by imposing themselves between the taxpayer and IRS. They will fight like bastards to preserve their privileged position.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-maker-of-turbotax...

The cruelty is the point.