The 10-month investigation by the GSA's inspector general 
    found that 52 percent of 18F's work was unbillable and 
    included an internal project to change its logo by altering 
    its font, alignment and background color. In all, 727 staff 
    hours, or $140,104, were spent on developing the brand, 
    including that logo change.

It seems that the author is intentionally obfuscating this point and making it seem as if 52% of 18F's work was put towards "making the logos look hipper," which is likely not the case. While "developing the brand" includes logo work, in most cases, that is just a small part of it. Developing a UI design spec, similar to Google's Material Spec [0], would also fall under "developing the brand."

Perhaps someone from 18F can speak to whether developing the U.S. Web Design Standards [1] is part of this category because if so, I would argue that spending $140k (which is roughly 1-2 software engineer annual salaries) on such a project is certainly worthwhile since this spec is part of the foundation for many future projects.

[0] https://design.google.com/spec

[1] https://standards.usa.gov/