>his son is learning Rust and that it is better

I'm hoping this was sarcasm.

This recommendation was in the form of a report by the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) in the White House. I would suspect it had more thought to it than you're suggesting.

I think this quote from the article is quite useful: "Recent studies from Microsoft and Google have found that about 70 percent of all security vulnerabilities are caused by memory safety issues." Which the article cites [1] [2]

There is validity to their argument on the source of security vulnerabilities.

[1] https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memory-safet...

[2] https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2019/07/a-proactive-approach...