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Betty McCollum became Minnesota’s pipeline to the Pentagon. The defense industry took notice.
With help from a former staffer turned lobbyist, the powerful Democrat and occasional critic of Pentagon spending is helping fund Minnesota’s defense industry. Defense donors are opening their wallets.
In 2024, U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum traveled to Indiana with a large Minnesota contingent to meet with Defense Department officials at an event focused on developing high-speed missiles and aircraft known as hypersonics.
There was urgency to the visit: A deadline for the Pentagon to fund a research facility loomed, and Minnesota wanted the money.
McCollum sat across from George Rumford, a high-ranking Defense Department official, and told him “to get the contracting sorted out,” according to Graham Candler, a renowned University of Minnesota hypersonics researcher who attended the dinner. Seated nearby was a St. Paul aerospace company executive whose firm donated over $10,000 to McCollum’s campaign and was chasing a hypersonics contract.
“Now there is motion,” Candler wrote in an email to