Guy I worked with,had joined the navy and was there for 10 years..He would tell me about the Times the high brass would come on board and the crew were told to toss machines etc into the sea..Some of it was brand new.Buuuut,if you had the items,your budget got cut..He said they were always getting more money for newer items.He joked if people could go to the bottom of the ocean there would be thousands of military hardware rotting away....
We did that in the corporate world too. If there was money left in the budget toward the end of the year we would spend it otherwise face having a smaller budget the next year.
But, I imagine its ten times worse in the public sector.
A few years ago when I lived in WA, I worked on some stuff with the mayor of Bremerton. She often confided in me that she could run the city with half the employees she has and nothing would change.
I never saw that happen. As a former Weapons/Combat Systems officer on a CG, whatever the other departments couldn’t spend went to the Chief Engineer and me. We never had a problem spending any flavor of funding; nothing on the SPY-1 radar is cheap.