I've heard you need to use it or lose when it comes to gov budgets. Anecdotes of jets dumping fuel into the ocean just to come back and refill to keep a budget.
That action in itself has some legitimate technical reasons at least - fighter jets are very envelope pushing and often cannot land safely while carrying a sufficiently full load of fuel. Say the jet can only land safely at 35% or less fuel capacity, is at 50% and needs to reach a target which requires at least 70% capacity to reach, fight, and return. Midair refueling isn't an option for whatever reason and others are logistically committed. Dumping 15% and landing to refuel before launching could make sense.
Granted stupid waste without any valid tactical or strategic edge case reasons aren't exactly unheard of in the military either.
It's a shit ton more work, and the government takes about 18 months to come up with the annual budget already. The only reason it works at all is the ability to let hundreds of thousands of small projects coast on their last budget.
