Private R&D has always towered above academics. People who can compete create significant innovations. People who can't compete stay as professors doing research because it's the easiest and most convenient pathway.
A better explanation for the slowness of the national laboratories is they their word will be taken more definitively on this issue than anyone else.
They are the ones with reputations and have to answer to critics in the private sector, amateur sector, and in Congress.
I think their slowness is an encouraging sign, it means LK99 isn't easily debunked.