The Paul Allen brain Atlas, among many other private initiatives, is capable of pursuing this goal better than the federal government, in the same way and for the exact same reasons that Craig Venter & Co. embarrassed the human genome project.
Besides, no one got into space faster than governments, no one has managed to develop cures and vaccines for large-scale and deadly diseases than labs directly funded by the NIH and other governmental agencies, and no one has had the infrastructure to build large-scale networks like the Internet like governments.
I won't even mention interstate/intercontinental highways, sewer systems, healthcare outside of the US, etc. There are simply some things that cannot be done by anyone but the uppercase-P People.