I spent 7 years at JPL, which is run mostly like a national lab, based on this comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34414812]

Is it a change of pace? Yes, but not in workload. You can easily work yourself to death if you let yourself. And politics happens everywhere -- usually in the form of missing the good projects. But the promotion frenzy is minimized, there's a sense of greater purpose in all the projects that is impossible to replicate anywhere else, and the technologists run everything. Managers help connect, but they don't typically determine your day to day priorities. In that sense, you can continuously shop around for good projects and teams without any formal change of position.