Edit: they ignore a lot of the rules that GSA (among others) mandate the rest of the government follow. One great example is cloud.gov, operating on the public Internet without finishing the fedramp approval process. It also doesn't comply with the TIC requirements GSA pushes on the rest of the .gov.

The hard problems in government IT are being able to pay enough to attract top talent and dealing with all the authorities and oversight that parent refers to. If you remove those two legally-required obstacles, you're cheating. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but comparing GSA's pet project to normal government is disingenuous at best.