The DOE (as a research agency) does a lot of biological and genomic research and is well qualified to do this kind of research, as other comments here have pointed out. It's not uncommon for researchers in different agencies to collaborate with each other, all labs have different areas of expertise and it would be naive to say any one from one agency is more "qualified" than another. The moniker at the top is not so meaningful.
The "low confidence" has a particular meaning in the world intelligence, and the DOE is also apart of the intelligence community given they run most of the US national research laboratories.