I personally don't think that the IEEE would have any capability of really shifting the industry. It isn't like IEEE guidance for privacy preserving programs really moved the needle. You needed legislation like GDPR to do that (and even then it remains incomplete). Ultimately, adopting memory-safe languages for systems programming is going to be very expensive. You need more than just recommendations to make that happen.
I do think there is risk with legislation binding developers too much or forcing them into suboptimal approaches if things aren't written well. One could imagine legislation that does not permit the use of Rust because of the presence of `unsafe`, but that would be a terrible misstep.
My only real gripe is I would prefer it came from the IEEE or something and not really from some government agency; or worse -> oracle or someone trying to get everyone to use java/their stuff.