> I find it surprising that the writers of those government documents seem oblivious of the strengths of contemporary C++ and the efforts to provide strong safety guarantees
No, Bjarne needs to realize that RAII and smart pointers are an old concept now, and they have shown to be insufficient, for decades now.
The bar for safety has been raised, and the Modern C++ is so behind, they don't even understand the issue, and still talk like it's about the C sins, or programmers not using it properly, or "but what about other bugs?".
The contemporary C++ is still a safety-third design where safety always loses to performance and backwards compatibility. The std::span has been standardized without .at(), and they're just getting around to adding it. Bounds checking by default on `operator[]` is one thing where C++ could be on par with Rust right now, but that is going to be relegated to an optional profile.