Govt as source of e-scrap?

I was recently talking to someone who works for the federal government and when I mentioned that I e-scrap, he said something like "Oh, we have so much old computer hardware laying around". Has anyone who's a small scale e-scrapper ever succeeded in getting stuff from some government office? It seems to me that a lot of them, especially the Fed, can be sitting on piles of old computer equipment. On the other hand, I can imagine that the amount of red tape is probably exponentially proportional to the size of those piles. Is it even worth considering? Or too much of a hassle for a little guy like me taking apart towers in his basement?..