The National Labs have to be a lot more careful with putting out potentially incorrect results due to their notoriety, being public funded and the public's lack

The National Labs have to be a lot more careful with putting out potentially incorrect results due to their notoriety, being public funded and the public's lack of respect for the trial and error involved in the scientific process. So they'll quietly slog away trying and retrying experiments, checking and rechecking their data before finally saying anything. As we saw with other previous big things, like the first gravitational wave detection, they took some time to make sure that they were right. I think that if it turns out to be real and national lab experiments prove that out, we'll be hearing rumors circulating within the field some time before an official announcement, just like how there were rumors about LIGO's detection circulating for a month before the announcement.