When I put government in scare-quotes, I was alluding to - quoting! - what this country's hard-right has always actually meant when they've used the word for said 70 years: they mean services! Human services, social services, the safety net, welfare assistance, and above all any shred of help for the poor, the uneducated, or the disabled.
Every American knows what the word means in the context of the project I'm talking about.
The expansion you're talking about is true, of course. It's just true of, say, the Pentagon, or the "intelligence community", or subsidies to [insert rapacious economic interest groups], or bailing out Wall Street, or the airlines, or the car companies, etc.