[I]t's unlikely that they'll willingly let neutral technical people (like CAIDA) take a look.

The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) coordinated the National Diversity Assurance Initiative (NDAI). In their February 2006 report, the executive summary on p.2 states:

The NDAI team consisted of representatives from the Federal Reserve, AT&T, BellSouth, MCI, Qwest, SBC, Sprint, Verizon and ATIS. Working together, the team was able to create a trustworthy environment where the carriers and the Federal Reserve shared highly sensitive information and industry knowledge.

How much political pressure did the Federal Reserve have to exert for this initiative? Looking forward, the report's recommendations state on p.17:

Telecommunication carriers believe that developing and implementing a next-step program that will assure telecommunications diversity in a multi-carrier environment will be costly and external funding will be required. The NDAI team, however, does not know the importance of diversity assurance to other critical sectors. An agency of the Federal government, perhaps the Department of Homeland Security could provide a collective view of the urgency for diversity assurance of telecommunication circuits supporting critical [National Security/Emergency Preparedness] NS/EP services of the other critical sectors.

While the recommendations from this initiative only address a narrow aspect of telecom network reliability, that still might be a start. It occurs to me, though, that the DHS focus might be too limited, and that Commerce might have a broader perspective.