I think this is a little unfair to NIST. Some parts aren't entirely factual. For example while DES was specified at 56 bits if we discount parity bits, I'm not sure how much choice they had in this - I suspect NSA/US gov more widely here. NSA, which is distinct from NIST but obviously works with them, requested changes to the DES S-Boxes during design that resulted in better protection from differential cryptanalysis, a technique unknown to anyone else at the time. So the NSA weakened DES in one way but strengthened it in another.

A lot of this weakening of ciphers was US government policy at the time: crypto was considered only to have military applications so in the same way foreign countries don't get the full US-edition fighter jet, they also didn't get the full crypto.

DualEC was a mess, no doubt, and should never have been standardized. I'm guessing they were railroaded by NSA. What is bizarre is that everyone knew it sucked. Not only the backdoor potential but also that it was slow. In fact the backdoor was even patented: https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC... which is my personal favorite part of the saga.

So while DualEC was a mess and the export policy was disliked, generally speaking the NIST process for standardising things is widely regarded.

Of course that does not mean you should trust them blindly, but examine the evidence. AES, SHA3, the lightweight crypto competition and the pqc process will all produce ciphers from largely non-US scientists and there are detailed discussions on the forums and at the workshops.

Of course if they decide to shut down these forums for discussion or ignore community consensus then there are definitely reasons to worry.