I recall a senator some years ago say that congressional committees didn’t even look at amounts less than .1 billion dollars. That’s $100 million!
Since no single grant was that large, only a very few really interested congressmen would ever notice.
There are very, very few prosecutions or even admissions of misspent grant money.
A billion here, a billion there. Pretty soon that adds up to real money!
Senator Everett Dirksen