OK in most of the government, it’s pretty routine for employees to get politically-driven orders that are at complete odds with reality.
When that happens, the CYA instinct kicks in (those who don’t have it, don’t last long in government employment). So they produce the report in such a way that the requester gets something that appears to be what they want, while not leaving the employee on the hook for how it is used.
This is a textbook example of that phenomenon. Enough verbiage to make a middle manager’s eyes glaze over so that they don’t realize that they didn’t really get what they wanted.
I see. Thankfully I was never subjected to that perfidy.
The thing that blows my mind is that this ‘report’ is so transparantly bad that it verges on signalling:
“We got nothing. Anyone with a brain, please know that.”
Even a layman, someone not in the field, can see that.