> Aren't they correct?

Not in my professional estimation, unless you want to reduce the argument to absurdly pedantic levels.

My quick response to the county government was for immediate effect, "The CIA uses AWS."

Most of the cloud providers (at least AWS/Azure) charge about 15-20% more for the "government" data centers. It's really not that much more. It's also not really much different, just slightly more auditing, if any difference at all. You also don't have to strictly be a government agency, you can also be a government contractor.

From what I understand, the infrastructure is really, technically, exactly the same, but just limited to certain customers. It's also, generally speaking going to be as, or more secure than any self-managed datacenter connected to the internet. The transparency could probably be a bit better.

note: used to work for a government contractor that received a LOT of hacking effort as a target.

“There is no cloud it’s just [computers]”

Since “cloud” is actually a marketing term (usually meaning virtualized servers), any company or department who says no to any mention of using the cloud is showing willful ignorance.