A senator^Wcongressman asked some questions about Rust and its nightly toolchain whenever Facebook’s cryptocurrency was under scrutiny by regulators. A French government agency has a whole set of coding guidelines for Rust. The government of Quatar was using Rust before 1.0; haven’t heard much since, but I assume they’re still using it. A New Zealand firefighter company was using some Rust.

Programming languages are tools. Governments use tools. It shouldn’t be surprising that they may have an interest.

That said I find your parent comment also a bit silly for the other reasons you state.

They care deeply about software security and memory flaws (everyone should). If rust had an ISO standard, then it could be used in more sensitive military and aerospace systems.

https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf

Also, when something is an ISO standard, then governments can't legislate that some countries may not be allowed to use it.

https://help.duo.com/s/article/7544?language=en_US