It's common for people to suggest that the NSA is 20 years ahead of the private sector, but it's not clear how true this is. That number is commonly cited as a result of changes the NSA made to DES, which later suggested (and Don Coppersmith openly confirmed) they knew about differential cryptanalysis 20 years before Shamir published anything about it.
However, that was long before cryptography became as popular a research topic outside of government circles. There are now many other places to go to do that type of research, and based on the public payscale data available, almost all of them pay better than the NSA. Recent developments, such as their Dual Counter Mode proposal in 2001, suggest that they might not be as far ahead as they once were.