Throwing some actual qualitative points on this grossly overstated article: it scored 92/100 on page speed [1], and 76/100 on YSlow [2].

Our companies site uses a mix of static/dynamic javascript which can cause as many as 100+ requests to be made and we're able to keep page load time < 2secs for the heaviest of pages. # of request doesn't automatically equal a slow website. Add the fact that this gov't site was likely mandated to support some ungodly old version of IE and you can easily see why there are so many js files.

[1]: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131007_5J_T8/ [2]: http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.healthcare.gov/1mQBgaqI