The expense is irrelevant.
I'm plenty familiar with this in the corp. environment from back then and I'm sure it was the same in government. A high capability machine would be purchased for a particular person or project. The person would be transferred, the project would be canceled or some such. At this point the high capability machine becomes an orphan to be assigned to whoever has no choice in the matter (it was often oversize or a bother to use).
For example, the expensive programmable accountants calculator I used until 1984 was never programmed again after I left and was passed on to whoever didn't have a say in the matter until it finally died many years later.
So the expense or specialized intent of a machine has little bearing on who ends up using it some years (or even months) after purchase.
