Susan Collins

In the summer of 2025, Sen. Susan Collins was at a crossroads.

She had been working for decades to lead the Senate committee that funds many of the federal government’s departments and programs. The position would allow her to bring hundreds of millions of dollars a year to Maine. She could steer spending bills so that they’d benefit the local workforce.

But the Trump administration had stopped following some normal rules of federal spending. It wanted to cut employees, claw back money Congress had already committed, pass bills with less oversight, and get rid of some areas of the government that Collins had long supported.

“The first year of the second Trump administration is the clearest, most direct assault on Congress’ power of the purse I think we’ve ever had,” said Douglas Kriner, professor of American government at Cornell University.

In Collins’ campaign for reelection, she’s running in large part on how her role as Appropriations chair helps communities at home; Trump’s willingness to go around Congress presents challenges to this key political selling point.

It’s unclear whom she’ll face in the fall since Graham Platner dropped out of the race, but a New York Times/Press Herald/Siena poll in June found that she faces a tough reelection: half of likely voters in Maine had an unfavorable opinion of Collins, and 48% had a favorable view.

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Whomever Democrats choose would probably not get on the Appropriations Committee right away if they win, and they definitely wouldn’t be the committee’s chair because of the way leadership roles get assigned in Washington. As a result, they would not have access to the levers that position affords.

Still, some moderate voters hungry for more oversight of the president say they’ll vote for any Democrat in order to give the party a majority in the Senate.

Collins has stood up for Congress’ power of the purse, experts say, as she adapted to the administration’s moves. The senator noted in an interview with the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram in June that she has opposed clawbacks she thought were bad for the state; freed up federal money dedicated to Maine that Trump had paused; and took unprecedented steps with appropriations bills to limit the administration.

In other cases, like an immigration enforcement spending bill she voted for in June that’s under renewed scrutiny in the aftermath of an ICE shooting in Biddeford last week, she has gone along with the Trump administration’s moves to skirt the appropriations process, said Molly Reynolds, vice president of the Brookings Institution policy center.

“While I think she’s worked on a bipartisan basis for a long time to keep the Senate appropriations process as functional as it is, we’re in a moment of real threat and challenge for this power of Congress as a whole,” Reynolds said.

Reynolds believes if Collins wanted to more aggressively exert Congress’ authority to control spending and oversee White House actions, her position gives her tools to do it, though other experts say even a position as powerful as hers has limits.

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“I’m not going to be able to prevail on everything,” Collins said. “But I have made a huge difference.”

CLASHES OVER SPENDING

Trump and his controversial pick for budget director, Russell Vought, returned to office in 2025 promising the White House would take a bigger role in how the federal government spends its money. They laid out plans to hold back funds that Congress appropriated, and promised to make spending decisions more partisan.

Collins supported Vought’s confirmation, consistent with her pattern on federal nominees she sees as qualified for the job.

“That doesn’t mean we agree on much of anything,” she later told reporters.

The Appropriations Committee is responsible for bills that fund the government in areas like transportation, agriculture and homeland security.

These bills give Collins a place to insert language that benefits industries in the state, and direct spending through earmarks to local infrastructure projects. Her management of these bills also gives her leverage to negotiate with other lawmakers and the White House.

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Last summer, she and her Democratic counterpart at the head of Appropriations, Washington Sen. Patty Murray, saw the Trump administration refusing to spend money as Congress had directed, and had to figure out what to do.

For example, in 2025, the Department of Education did not give out funding to public schools on its normal July 1 schedule. Collins said it could cost Maine $28 million.

“No previous administrations had done this,” Collins said of the liberties Trump took. “We learned the hard way.”

In prior years, Congress left some flexibility in spending bills because circumstances can change partway through the year and federal agencies need to be able to adjust their spending, said Bruce Evans, who staffed the Appropriations Committee and its subcommittees for 20 years, including during Collins tenure, and is now a consultant in Washington.

“But if administrations stop asking permission or go beyond guidelines, Congress is inclined to push back,” Evans said.

Collins and Murray made sure the next appropriations bill specified that schools receive money on time. In this and other instances, their solution was to try to dictate more precisely how the money should be spent.

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“We never had the kinds of guardrails that we have now,” Collins said.

The spending bills they passed included detailed requirements on staffing to stop the administration from cutting certain positions, Reynolds said. Some barred Trump from closing federal offices, The New York Times reported.

It’s a major way the Appropriations Committee under Collins’ leadership is standing up to the Trump administration more than the public realizes, Evans said.

Collins has also opposed Trump’s plans to cut biomedical research funding. The president’s budget last year proposed a nearly 41% reduction for the National Institutes of Health. It’s normal for a president and Congress to have different spending priorities and, in this case, Collins used her first full hearing as chair in April 2025 to focus on it.

She called Trump’s actions an “abrupt cancellation of grants, proposals to slash federal funding, and laying off of scientists and technical experts with apparently little or no justification.”

The committee backed her up and agreed that instead of cuts, it would increase the NIH budget by 1%. This year, though, Trump proposed a 13% cut to NIH that would eliminate institutes including one that seeks to understand health disparities.

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Collins has also criticized Trump’s efforts to cut programs that help people with low incomes pay for heat or go to college, and used her influence to preserve their funding. She points to that, and her success restoring college and university research money, as evidence she’s pushing back effectively on the president.

Eighty-eight awards at the University of Maine System were canceled or suspended for a total of about $31 million, including $1.5 million a year in funding for ocean research that left 20 employees and $23.5 million in annual economic impact for Maine’s fisheries in limbo.

University president Joan Ferrini-Mundy said in an interview that Collins was essential to getting the funding back by calling Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

When the administration held up nearly $200,000 to support the university’s safety training for workers with disabilities in heritage industries, Collins called U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins. After a two-month pause, the funding was restored. When the University of Southern Maine lost two years’ funding for veterans, Collins’ call to Education Secretary Linda McMahon was key to getting it back, university spokeswoman Samantha Warren said.

In all, the University of Maine held onto 63 awards for about $22.2 million, Warren said. Other grants were also terminated while the university and the government were still negotiating the terms.

In some clashes with the president, Collins hasn’t gotten the outcome she wanted. Last summer, the Trump administration asked Congress to cancel money for foreign aid and public broadcasting. Such rescission requests from the president start in the Appropriations Committee.

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Collins said she “could have just let that go” through to the full Senate for consideration, where it needed only a simple majority to pass, but she didn’t. She used her chairmanship to hold a hearing.

“I wanted people to realize what the implications were going to be,” she said. In the hearing, she drew attention to the White House’s plan to cut an HIV/AIDS prevention program called PEPFAR, which senators later took out of the bill.

Even with that change, Collins voted against the rescissions, but the bill passed.

As the government’s fiscal year ended last fall, Trump’s team held back another $5 billion in foreign aid. Collins called this type of rescission, which skirted Congress entirely, “a clear violation of law.”

The White House did it anyway, and Politico reported that it may again this year.

Daniel Schuman of the American Governance Institute, which advocates for a strong legislative branch, said those types of actions by the Trump administration make Collins less powerful than she would’ve been under a prior administration.

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UNPRECEDENTED FUNDING

In Collins’ first full budget year as chair, she was able to get appropriations bills passed for 2026 and her office said she was “reasserting Congress’ role in the funding process.”

But there was one issue the parties couldn’t reach an agreement on: funding for immigration enforcement. Republicans resorted to a mechanism called reconciliation so they didn’t need Democrats’ help to pass the bill.

Trump signed it on June 10. It provided $70 million to ICE and Customs and Border Protection. The funding did not have the kinds of guardrails and oversight that normal appropriations do. Agencies typically have to go back to Congress each year to ask for further funding, but the reconciliation bill provided three years’ worth of money.

Collins voted for it. In a statement, she said she wanted to “ensure funding for two crucial law enforcement agencies.” She said part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s work is to prevent crimes like human smuggling, and “In Maine, Border Patrol does critical work to prevent dangerous and illegal weapons, drugs and other contraband from entering our country.”

The senator reiterated that position last week as Mainers took to the streets in several cities, protesting her support for ICE funding after an agent killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford.

As a matter of procedure, the reconciliation bill undermined Collins’ own committee’s relevance, said James Wallner, who worked for Republicans in Congress and is now an expert in government at the Foundation for American Innovation.

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“The fact that appropriators went along with that, I think is pretty astonishing,” he said. “It took away their power and it provided a template for future efforts to do so.”

Schuman said that, before this, he wasn’t aware of the reconciliation process being used for multiyear base funding. “You just don’t do things this way,” he said.

Reynolds said that’s where Collins’ shared Republican policy goals with the president may have outweighed her desire to protect the Senate as an institution.

Collins said it was the last time this year there would be a reconciliation bill. The president wants Congress to do it again for defense spending. Collins said that is not an option.

OPTIONS FOR THE CHAIR

Congressional experts are divided on what other options Collins has to exert authority to control spending and oversee the White House’s actions.

Appropriators’ power comes from the fact they can choke off funding for an agency or department if they don’t like what’s happening, Wallner said, though he added, “Long gone are the days when appropriators would flex their muscle to bring a recalcitrant administration into line.”

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This is not particular to Collins, he said. Over the past two decades, Democratic and Republican presidents have expanded their power, while Congress has reduced its own chances for members to put their foot down by packaging spending bills together and finishing them after the fiscal year already started.

Kriner, the scholar at Cornell, is also skeptical of what an Appropriations chair could do by herself, saying it would take “a willingness to have a full-on institutional challenge with the president.” Wallner believes that sort of action would be out of character for Collins.

Evans, the former Appropriations staffer, said Collins’ approach has been to achieve as much as possible for Maine without cratering the entire appropriations process.

“She and all her colleagues have an interest in seeing the process get to the end,” he said.

Schuman suggested Collins could require more reporting and testimony from federal agencies as a condition of their funding. Or, Reynolds said, the Appropriations Committee could tell the White House that it won’t fund things the president really wants unless the White House stops going around the process.

“Sen. Collins can be a bulwark against the encroaching Trump presidency that is swallowing the rest of government,” Schuman said, though it may require her to “go to war to defend Congress’ ability to set spending policy.”

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It’s a fight some voters are pining for, and Democrats vying for their party’s nomination since Platner dropped out this month are promising they’ll do it, though they wouldn’t have Collins’ chairmanship. In her reelection bid, Collins is contending with the fact that some voters, put off by what they see as Trump’s overreach, want to vote in a Democratic majority.

Donna Wilson, from Sanford, who is not a Democrat, was among several voters who told the Press Herald they previously supported Collins but don’t plan to this year. Wilson said she is sad about it, but she wants to stop the Trump administration from setting precedents in going around Congress.

OBSTACLES TO SPENDING BILLS

Normally by this time in the summer, the Appropriations Committee would debate and mark up next year’s spending bills, but Collins has canceled meetings because she and Murray couldn’t agree on the top line. Democrats particularly don’t like Trump’s $1.5 trillion defense budget request.

“There are flashing warning signs about the health of the appropriations process,” Reynolds said.

That’s in part because of Trump’s approach to spending, she said. Trust among members has eroded, especially after the rescissions last year, and they worry the administration won’t carry out whatever lawmakers negotiate anyway.

Some Republicans believe Democrats have held up spending bills in order to deny Collins an election-year win, Politico reported last month.

Appropriations Committee staff said on Friday that they hope to be able to schedule markups as soon as possible but the hospitalization of committee member Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has contributed to the delay.

Evans said Collins has worked hard to keep things on the rails because she believes it’s the right thing to do and that it will produce the best outcome: to let members of Congress direct spending to the places they think it’s needed all around the country, especially in Maine.

“In terms of sheer tenacity,” he said, “I’d put her at the top of the list.”