To start with, each quarter during my couple of years with the civil engineers at Andrews was punctuated by a scramble to find some kind of project on which to spend the portion of the budget that we hadn't yet managed to use up. BINGO! I used to work for the Corp of Engineers. We did the same thing. At the end of every quarter we had to spend all the dough we had left. Bought a bunch of crap we'd never use in a million years.
Ditto NASA.