How close are you to these guys? When you say "I've watched them build their own stack", are you referring to having read some blog posts, or do you know them personally?

The money that the fairly small team are spending is a drop in the ocean compared to many government funded projects. If you want to get angry about misspent public funds, I can think of countless other areas that are orders of magnitude worse. The reality is that a small team of people directly employed by the government working fairly effectively can build and discard their stack as many times as they want and still be significantly cheaper than getting a big company to do it.