The standardization of Simon and Speck has been an ongoing fight within ISO/IEC JTC1 SC27 WG2 since 2014 or so, but looks like it's finally game over for now.
What happened here seems like a combination of two things: first, a general statement that the community is skeptical of NSA-related standards after the Dual EC fiasco, just on principles, and, second, process concerns about the way NSA interacts with standards bodies --- their work is considered poorly documented and their engagement with the academic research community (for instance, to answer concerns about flaws in their designs) is poor.
Slap NSA's hand for being abusive to the privacy of everyone, including their own citizens? We need more of that.
They should be going out of business because all their customers left in droves.
But they didn't and RSA is still an esteemed security company.
What happened when Juniper firewalls were outed by Snowden. Did we ever hear the name of the employee who backdoored their product?
Surely they use revision control and can tell who contributed what. I have to wonder if the NSA mole still works there too. Zero transparency from these "Security Companies".
Casting political problems against technical problems is a tough endeavor.
It would be a very blatant move because it'd be rather suspicious if the NSA chose not to use these ciphers. Still, the possibility might in small part contribute to this failure.