This is the difference between responsibility and accountability.
The person at the top might not know what each recipient is doing, but is still accountable for the funding decisions that were made (and oversaw the people and process that made those decisions on the organisations behalf).
>>Closi+(OP)
Is this a different grant than what I'm thinking of? The institution that got the grant is a global non-profit(I think, and run by americans afair). They actually appealed this and said how damaging this is because they've had a long term working relationship with various labs across the globe relating to virus research. They've been on This Week on Virology many times on a variety of different subjects. Is the funding in question here different from that? Rand Paul makes it sound like the money went directly to China, which isn't the case.