It's NOT incompetence.
They know exactly what they are doing.
Their agenda is the destruction of America and replace it with a Communist Police State.
It's not rocket science...and even the blind & dead Ray Charles can see it.
I maintain it is gross incompetence. That is an unaccountable bureaucracy that is trying to pursue its internal goals without reference to doing what should be its job. IMHO, that’s why they maintained the gain of function work through other channels, because its some persons or sub-groups rice-bowl. They have probably got, from decades back, a funding stream and career incentives to do this stuff, so that’s what they had to continue to do.