Strangely Mathworks is not among the usual cast of characters for DOE software grants, though they've made a fortune just from license fees paid by the labs. The last decade or so has seen a real shift away from Matlab.
Unfortunately this is not as novel as the press release would have you believe. More a reinvention of a wheel in a pet language. The DOE labs in general are quite famous for this sort of thing, NREL being one of the worst recent offenders along with PNNL. It would be interesting to know how many millions of taxpayer dollars are sitting in the code graveyard that is the NREL github page.
You'd be hard pressed to find too many facts in a study like this. These are largely conjecture with a list of assumptions and simplifications longer than the study itself. NREL is particularly famous for these. The reality is there are as many people who think the grid should be split into more pieces as there are people who think it should be unified.
But it's a fair point regarding the political influence in these type things, though it's not just the current administration. In a couple of months we will all be changing the verbiage of our proposals from resiliency, security back to renewable integration to satisfy our funding overlords.