So...yes, there is a big role for government labs and government-funded academic groups to do that kind of work. and the Department of Energy supports a lot of that work! But there's a wrinkle here, which is that NIF is "owned" by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. LLNL is one of the Department of Energy's 3 "weapons" labs. See, for historical reasons [which you probably know already] the DOE owns the nuclear weapons design mission instead of Defense being in charge. 3 of the DOE national labs [Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia] are considered the weapons labs. Livermore and Los Alamos are each responsible for nuclear weapons science and design, while Sandia is responsible for the engineering side. The US also does not test live nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War, so the weapons labs acquired a new mission - "stockpile stewardship and management". Essentially, "go do a bunch of science to make sure that the nuclear arsenal will still work every time we need it to". A big part of this was figuring out how to experimentally replicate the conditions of a thermonuclear explosion, aka fusion. NIF is first and foremost in support of that effort, and not the energy job.