Skepticism is valid because they are the NSA but remember that not every american government related organization is bad for the development of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency. The Tor Browser project was first made by the US Navy and their goal was to create a circuit based network which was capable of operating on low latency which would provide anonymity to its users. This quickly turned into a very good project for those wanting to conceal their identity while browsing the web and expanded beyond military use. The military has probably moved away from using the tor browser project because of exit nodes showing plain data and can be used by anyone unless they have control of their own nodes and only connect to them. The point I'm trying to make despite these projects being anti government in certain areas they were still developed by organizations close to the government. The Tor Browser went against NSA's principles of wanting all the information they can on everyone just like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies encourage anonymity.

The funding that NSA can bring will certainly help the development towards a better alternative to lamport, lattice and multivariate based cryptocurrency if it doesn't provide a better alternative its always better to have more minds contributing to a issue because other projects like lamport or does not have the funding that the NSA does will be able to learn and integrate additions that the NSA have proposed.