In the winter of 2002, with the federal budget stretched thin, President George W. Bush asked Congress to give back money that lawmakers had earmarked for local projects so it could be used instead to fund the Pell grant program, which helps needy students pay for college. One of the local projects that had drawn particularly harsh scrutiny was a $273,000 federal grant that U.S. Rep. Sam Graves had procured to study goth culture in Blue Springs, Missouri. "It's one of those priorities that my constituents asked me to fight for," Graves told an Associated Press reporter at the time.
