Playing around with Sequoia-PGP again. And it just strikes me how easy it makes it. This time I played with sqop instead of sq.
$ sqop generate-key > key.asc
$ cat file | sqop encrypt key.pub > file.asc
$ cat file.asc | sqop decrypt key.asc > file2
$ sha256sum file file2 | cut -d\ -f1 | uniq -c
2 34fbc467b8c62...
Try doing that gpg without needing any $HOME/.gnupg directory. And then try putting that in a script run by some locked-down user via a cron job.
(I know this should be signed as well, not dug into that yet.)