I always find it very ironic people apply the "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" principle to politicians, who are part of the government.

Have you ever had a really great mentor or teacher who was excellent at explaining things to you? Good news, you've now got a budget to hire several of them in full-time exclusively for yourself.

Unsure about something? Just ask and a huge apparatus of several departments, featuring dozens of expert panels with hundreds of domain specific experts each will sift through huge databases, many of them not available to anyone else but the government, of state-of-the-art research, current events, historic events, standards, whatever ..., they will analyze your problem from every possible perspective and make the result of these efforts available to you, together with several recommendations of actions according to the guidelines you provided.

I highly doubt that there are more than a hundred people on this planet who could be incompetent under these conditions. What we're observing is not incompetence, but a conflict of interests, between what they want and how often they need to throw you a little bone to keep you obedient.