Mel Brooks sums it up nicely, multiple times, in History of the World Part I:

  "All fellow members of the Roman senate hear me. Shall we continue to build palace after palace for the rich? Or shall we aspire to a more noble purpose and build decent housing for the poor? How does the senate vote?" -- Roman Senate Leader
  "Fuck the poor" -- The entire Senate

  "It is said that the people are revolting." -- Count de Monet
  "You said it! They stink on ice!" -- King Louis XVI

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.