Impractical question

Something occurred to me just now. Research that's done on the government dime -- you'd expect that, except in cases of classified info, The Public At Large in principle ought to have open access to the results. But all the journals cost money, and most people have no access to an academic library. Huh. I guess private citizens could write to the authors and ask for reprints, but that implies that they can find authors and addresses for works on the topic of interest, and not every govt-funded project is going to wind up indexed in a publicly-accessible database.

Is this as unfair as it looks on the surface? Is there a practical way around it?

It probably doesn't come up that much, but still.