That's promising to hear. I worked IT for a large government contractor for years and it often took long amounts of time to roll out new images to the whole company. Considering the average lease time of 3 years, a full IE8 rollout could certainly take time.
I was especially surprised to hear about the piloting of Firefox. Is there a site somewhere to keep up on technology rollouts across the different US Gov't agencies? Or at least the ones EDS provides support for?