when I hear about an organization that fails to wipe sensitive information off of hard drives because it is too noisy, the first thing that comes to mind is incompetence
That's a separate department and if they don't want their degausser, I'll gladly take it.

There are so many ways that this could have been avoided
Of course. For starters? Get your circulars & mandates into the hands of the people that need them. Like me. When I come on board a new department, I -need- that kind of information. For the people putting out the information, -verify- that I got it. Make me sign -something- as proof that I did in fact get the proper documentation. Hell, make all IT staff take an online course on state mandates regarding excess hardware. We do it for everything else, why not this? (That's the poorly enforced mandates part).

As previously stated... just remove the HDDs
Ideally that's what one would think. However, there was no clarity on what state the computers needed to be in when they were dropped off at surplus. (That's the lack of communication between departments and the state's primary IT department part)

What was the hangup?
In our particular case, 2 drives went to surplus that weren't supposed to. It was purely accidental. We were in the middle of a reorganizing a substantial amount of excess hardware within very limited storage space. Unfortunately, 2 systems that crashed (which were not wiped) got put in the same room as 20 other systems (which were wiped) destined for surplus. (That's the poor planning part).

Had there been a clear-cut mandate to remove the drives, my life would have been MUCH easier. I actually spent MORE time wiping the drives then just pulling the damn things out. In addition, I got drilled by the auditors like little or no effort was put in to clean these drives when that's the furthest thing from the truth.