As you've rightly pointed out, we have the mechanism, now let's fund it properly!
I'm in Canada, and our science funding has likewise fallen year after year as a proportion of our GDP. I'm still benefiting from A100 clusters funded by tax payer dollars, but think of the advantage we'd have over industry if we didn't have to fight over resources.
In Australia at least, anyone who is enrolled at or works at a university can use the taxpayer-subsidised "Gadi" HPC which is part of the National Computing Infrastructure (https://nci.org.au/our-systems/hpc-systems). I also do mean anyone, I have an undergraduate student using it right now (for free) to fine-tune several LLMs.
It also says commercial orgs can get access via negotiation, I expect a random member of the public would be able to go that route as well. I expect that there would be some hurdles to cross, it isn't really common for random members of the public to be doing the kinds of research Gadi was created to benefit. I expect it is the same way in this case in Canada. I suppose the argument is if there weren't any gatekeeping at all, you might end up with all kinds of unsuitable stuff on the cluster, e.g. crypto miners and such.
Possibly another way for a true random person to get access would be to get some kind of 0-hour academic affiliation via someone willing to back you up, or one could enrol in a random AI course or something and then talk to the lecturer in charge.
In reality, the (also taxpayer-subsidised) university pays some fee for access, but it doesn't come from any of our budgets.
I get my resources through a combination of servers my lab bought with using a government grant and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (nee Compute Canada)'s cluster.
These resources aren't available to the public, but if I were king for a day we'd increase science funding such that we'd have compute resources available to high-school students and the general public (possibly following training on how to use it).
Making sure folks didn't use it to mine bitcoin would be important, though ;)
I'm in Canada, and our science funding has likewise fallen year after year as a proportion of our GDP. I'm still benefiting from A100 clusters funded by tax payer dollars, but think of the advantage we'd have over industry if we didn't have to fight over resources.