The NIST and other state organsiation continue to be active in this area. However not all they do is poor evil and all the open standards AES or SHA1 have also been studied and reviewed by many other cryptographers. Most consider them still save for practical uscases.<p>Nowdays the NIST is guiding the process of standartisation, but does not itself activally doing anything. Most cryptographers agree that in the process for SHA3 ran quite smothly and they did a good job. However when the NIST tried to over some improvments, the crypto community heavly stomped them and these improvments never went into the standart.<p>There were talks on these subject in the last couple of Chaos Communication Congresses.