Unfortunately, there's quite a bit of misinformation in this article.
The author makes it sound as simple as hiring fresh hackers from Silicon Valley to take over failed projects from stodgy software developers from the large D.C. contracting firms.
Having worked on government projects like those cited in this article for several years, I can tell you that it is the government agencies themselves, and not so much the developers who are to blame. To build a cool iPhone app for a private service, you can pretty much use whatever tools and timetables you want.
Not so with government tech. With even small projects, you are beholden to policies that were written several levels up. Things like no cloud-based hosting, no sites that don't use government-written style guidelines, and in many cases, no development that occurs outside the government facility. If you hamstrung pretty much any private tech company with the same restrictions government contractors have to deal with, I can guarantee you they would look a lot different.
That's not to say that change can't occur, but to attack the contractors is to misunderstand the root cause of why government software is historically so bad. There are actually many, many very talented developers and software engineers steeped in the latest lean startup theories inside the beltway, but they can seldom use any of that because government policies stand in their way. For most projects, you are dealing with literally thousands of regulations throughout the development process, and most software apps have to account for ever-changing laws and policies that are specific to each application.
However I have already seen a great deal of positive change, with many agencies opening their minds to newer, faster methods of development and allowing better tools to be used.