The NSA has a dual (or more?) mission. One of those missions is to help protect U.S. interests, commerce etc. For that part of their mission they may make recommendations or help other government agencies technically to help U.S. commerce to have good cryptography available. See the section on the NSA in Scheier's book, Applied Cryptography for more on this.
How trustworthy they are in these positive (from the point of view of those of us wanting privacy, even from them) missions given other conflicting missions, I don't know.
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