Re: Is that it??
"Or did they just have way more hardware than they knew what to do with?"
That's most likely the case.
I was doing some third party IT work for a charity organisation, and noticed all their workstations had more ram than anyone else (even a multi billion dollar bank that's our client), more than what they needed.
They only had one server, however, they picked the best of the best of everything, the server was rack mount, when a tower in the same class and brand would have done the job. The raid controller was battery backed, just in case the server lost power, it would restore outstanding data at next power up.
And a rack mount UPS, and a pull-out tray for the server keyboard, mouse and monitor.
It was a whole lot more than what they needed. So I asked our people. Turns out, they're legislated on how much they can ask in donations in any given month, based on the previous month's spend. So, if they have a quiet month, they won't be able to ask for as much the next month.
Easy fix: Burn up extra cash on computer equipment and other fancy crap. You don't get lean months too often, but often enough you can see they spend in splurges like that.