NIST is basically the publishing arm of the NSA, so it really depends on whether the NSA is taking the "protect national information assets" or the "attack foreign information assets" part of its mandate more seriously from year to year.
NIST does a lot of really neat work outside of crypto standards. Judah Levine and all the other
metrology folks are awesome. It's unfortunate that they get grouped together by comments like this.
Sorry, yes I only meant in the context of cryptography of course. NIST is a great organization and it's really a historical accident that they do anything with crypto.
