Meh. This is from Tarlov. Her frustration pleases me.
Yeah of the trillions in spending very few dollars are earmarked by congress for specific recipients. If congress gives NIH a billion dollars for research on cancer that may be as specific as it gets. NIH i.e. the executive branch and by that I mean some 57 year old career bureaucrat who couldn’t make it in the private sector then decides who will get the money and as long as it is cancer related and the work is done by a company/researcher/university/pharmaceutical company qualified to do the work no problem. But there is where it can get dicey when a lot of money is doled out to a lot of people by bureaucrats who may be stupid/lazy/incompetent/crazy/crooked/or plain goofy.
Or it gets doled out to people who spend 90% of the money on administration and 10% on shoddy research. Now we have political hack DEI judges trying to micromanage the process which is a lot scarier than a 19 year old with big balls and a 150 IQ using read only access to look for fraud. And BTW you can buy all the SSN numbers your heart desires. I used to have Bill Gates and Hillary Clinton’s SSNs. They came off of SEC forms that corporate insiders are required to file and any shlub could have walked into the SEC grabbed those filings off the shelf and paid 35 cents (back then) to have them copied. The filings are electronic now but the data is still available. Only difference is filers are no longer required to provide SSN. Still there are a multitude of other legal sources for SSNs and other socalled personal information. If Elon Musk wanted your SSN he has a lot of easier ways to get it than stealing it from the Treasury database.