So, we don't have to pay for the access, great.

But searching for and collating all these tens of thousands of papers in each federal repository will have to be done... manually... by every researcher.

.....Oh. You wanted search? You wanted indexing? You wanted a centrally managed service to pull from all those different federal repositories? Well, you're gonna need a company to develop all that and run it. You can use it for a subscription fee. That just happens to be the same cost as access to journals. Or if you're lucky, subsidized by ads for Subway and Nike.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, people.