The knee jerk reaction, of course, is to look for a catch in anything Homeland Security is doing. However, this seems like a really good idea. Finally, they are contributing in a positive way to public safety.
Barely. If you look at what they're offering it's FindBugs, clang, gcc, and cppcheck. Completely bog-standard tools that anyone should be using anyway, but they're being paid $23M taxpayer dollars for it. Shee-it, I could do the same thing with $10K to cover the cost of renting some EC2 space, and I'll spend the remaining $22.99M on coke and hookers (seriously, how can they have spent $23M on this? One person could set it up in a few hours, the only constraint is how many VMs you need to spin up if lots of people sign up for it).
This looks very much a DHS solution, vast sums of money spent on something that should be nearly free. Not to mention that while gcc -wall, clang, and FindBugs aren't bad as far as free software goes, they're nowhere near the level of commercial offerings like Fortify, Coverity, and others.
OK, so in terms of cost/benefit it's more of a TSA solution then strictly a DHS solution.