Other than the title might suggest this happened at the (second highest) administrative level, the federal state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (Landesministerium), not at the Bundesministerium. Also reportedly some of the machines were brand new so no need for "radical" upgrade methods for all of them.<p>The only good thing about this that federal auditing by the Landesrechnungshof seems to work, since they complained about it in their yearly report in the first place and it got only picked up by the press after that.<p><a href="http://www.lrh-mv.de/land-mv/LRH_prod/LRH/Veroeffentlichungen/Jahresberichte/LFB_2012.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.lrh-mv.de/land-mv/LRH_prod/LRH/Veroeffentlichunge...</a> (german pdf, page 152)
IT departments generally run on extremely tight human resources and tend toward spending money on equipment rather than people, so I can kind of see this happening.
They did clean their servers. The slashdot title/summary are a bit misleading. Perhaps they wanted new PCs already and simply estimated that it might be a good time to upgrade rather than clean them?<p>Still wish they would've donated the PCs instead of throwing them away.