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The largest "public" scientific institutions in the United States are the national labs. Most famously, Los Alamos, but also INL, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Fermilab, NREL, NTL and some others I am forgetting. From my experience, their mission tends to be less aligned with "doing science to benefit people," and more aligned with, "doing science that's too expensive or risky for businesses to do themselves." Or, "doing science for 'national security.'" You see very much the same thing at NASA, where they consult and do science on technologies expressly to benefit the business.
In comparison, the largest scientific institution in Europe is CERN, and is rather equivalent to the US's national labs. Though I have no direct experience with CERN, from what I have seen from their experiments and practices, they tend to do science more for the sake of science compared with the American labs.
Granted, this is a vast oversimplification of the topic, but the point still stands, "the US government is aligned with companies that exploit science for profit."