This is the result of an organizational problem
I have no problem believing this is directly associated with the "culture" of US government.
A big part of it is going to be how department budgets "work" within the government. Basically, if you don't use it, you lose it. Any department coming in under budget, very likely will see their annual budget reduced by that amount the next year, because "obviously, you don't need it." This causes all kinds of hijinks around the end of the fiscal year. As a tech in the Marine Corps (yes, hence the screen name), back in the early 90's, I got to see it in stark contrast. We did circuit board repair in our shop. We repaired boards right down to the individual component on the board. As part of that, we had a yearly allotment of powdered gold to use for re-electroplating contacts on the boards. Come the end of the fiscal year, if we hadn't used it, we'd get a reduced allotment the next year. That would really cause issues if we had MORE boards to repair the next year. So, in typical USMC fashion, we were told to improvise, adapt, and overcome. Here's what would happen. EVERYTHING got plated until it was used up. Every circuit board we could get our hands on had their contacts plated. Standard contacts that didn't require gold got plated. Dog tags got plated. Pens got plated. Anything that would hold still long enough to get jammed into the electroplating machine, got plated.
So there's the first questionable practice.
Second comes from the fact that it is a Herculean effort to get rid of ANYTHING in government service. I have a friend that teaches IT courses in the US Job Corps system. It is an absolute nightmare to get rid of excess or outdated equipment. PCs that are 11 to 12 years old sit in stacks gathering dust because they're no longer of any use, but nobody wants to wade through the bureaucratic nightmare to get rid of any of it.
With those two behaviors in mind, is it really any stretch to imagine that government datacenters have racks crammed with equipment that is either surplus to requirement or beyond usefulness? New equipment keeps coming in whether it has a use or not, because otherwise the budget is lost and in the future they MIGHT need additional kit. Nothing gets thrown away so there are probably racks of legacy servers just sucking up power and not actually fulfilling any tasks because nobody wants to jump through the hoops required to retire it from service and dispose of it.
I am honestly surprised it's not actually worse than it is.