Your Tax Dollars at work
I had something like that in mind. The first couple of demo models would be built at great expense and prove worthless for their primary function and then some bright spark would decide that NASA should own and operate them for some unintended and fairly useless purpose, like supporting electric unmanned aircraft flights or something.
After all, Ames has Hangar-1, so they must be able to use it...
This would be yet another huge drain on money, but would get some ground staff into the Hangar.
(Logical as anything else in govt.)