Under normal circumstances, Senator Susan Collins would now be one of the most powerful figures in official Washington.
In January, the Maine Republican became the chair of the Senate appropriations committee, long considered one of the most consequential panels in the upper chamber. Nicknamed the “college of cardinals” for its outsized power over federal spending, it can approve funds for favored programs and slash it for others while blocking attempts by the White House to get in the way. One former chair of the committee used his power to get more than 30 federal projects named for himself in his home state. On its website, the committee boldly asserts its power, quoting from the constitution that “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of Appropriations made by law.”
Collins is unusual among Republican congressional leaders because she has frequently broken with Trump and his policies in the past. She voted to impeach Donald Trump after the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol, and said publicly last year that she would not vote for him in the 2024 election.
Yet Collins has so far failed to wield the full force of power she has inherited. She has largely stood by and watched while Elon Musk has done her job for her through Doge’s brutal slash and burn tactics. Trump and Musk have ignored Collins and the appropriations committee while they tear apart the federal establishment without congressional authorization.
Worse, Collins has had to cope with repeated budgetary and legal attacks by Trump on her home state, which he started because he got mad that Maine’s Democratic governor challenged him during a White House meeting in February. Collins has tried to act as a quiet intermediary, but she has so far been unwilling to use the full power of the appropriations committee to fight back. “She has tremendous power, but right now she doesn’t seem able to figure out how to use it,” said Ethan Strimling, the former Democratic mayor of Portland, Maine. “She’s getting pushed around.”
If Collins chose to challenge Trump and Musk, she has a number of powerful levers she could pull. She could call hearings to force Musk to testify in public about Doge, which he has been loth to do, and then use her committee to pass legislation to force the administration to abide by the congressionally authorized budgets for every federal agency. If Trump and Musk didn’t comply, she could use her committee’s power over all discretionary spending in the budget to block funds for their favorite programs, such as White House expenses and SpaceX’s contracts with Nasa. She could also work with two other leading Republican critics of Trump – Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – on the appropriations committee, to pass the legislation out of the panel.
While those measures would probably not pass the full Senate, they would have at least forced Trump and Musk to think twice about any further encroachments on Collins’s power.
But by nature, Collins hates confrontation. She may have even feared taking smaller, more subtle steps to challenge Trump, figuring he might get the Senate Republican leadership to turn against her and take away her committee chairmanship. So she has stayed on the sidelines.
In fact, Collins is just one of dozens of Republican congressional leaders who have surrendered their power to Trump. Virtually all of the Republican chairs of once-powerful committees in the Senate and the House have stood by and done little while Trump has usurped their authority, even as Trump’s policies have stalled the economy and his approval ratings have plummeted. GOP leaders fear Trump’s continued grip on the Republican base and the possibility that he might endorse a primary challenger or wreak other forms of revenge against them if they get out of line. Murkowski said in April that the fear of retribution by Trump was real. “We are all afraid,” she said.
So while leading Republicans privately fume and occasionally complain publicly about Trump’s chaotic policies, their surrender has left it to the courts to prevent the president from taking actions that legally require congressional authorization.
Last Wednesday, Collins finally pushed back against Trump, at least a little. She chaired the first hearing of the year of the appropriations committee, during which she attacked the Trump administration for slashing funding for biomedical research while also canceling grants and laying off workers in critical health agencies.
“Proposed funding cuts, the firing of essential federal scientists, and policy uncertainties threaten to undermine the foundation for our nation’s global leadership” in biomedical research, Collins said at the hearing. In a rare assertion of her congressional authority, Collins also pointed out that many of Trump’s cuts to biomedical research “are directly contrary to language approved by this committee, year, after year, after year, and incorporated into appropriations law”.
She then voted on the same day for an unsuccessful Democratic-backed resolution that would have blocked Trump’s global tariffs.
Now looming is an even bigger opportunity for Collins to take on Trump and Musk. In order to make Doge’s budget cuts permanent, they need to be included in next year’s federal budget approved by Congress. In recent days, Collins has signalled that she is reluctant to approve many of Musk’s cuts in the 2026 budget, and mentioned to reporters that she wants to protect foreign aid programs that she has long advocated, including the Women’s Global Health Initiative and the global initiative to combat HIV/Aida, known as Pepfar.
But for longtime political observers of Collins, her pivot to attacking Trump comes with a healthy dose of skepticism. Despite her outrage over biomedical research cuts, she voted in February to confirm the nation’s most prominent anti-vaxxer, Robert F Kennedy Jr, to be secretary of health and human services. In fact, Collins has developed a reputation in both the Senate and back home in Maine of only opposing Trump and the Republican leadership when they really don’t need her support or her vote. “She has said she is concerned [about Trump] so often that it’s a meme now,” noted Nora Flaherty-Stanford, the communications director for the Maine People’s Alliance, a progressive group.
“The moments when she stands on principle [and opposes Trump] are often the moments her party already has the votes,” added Brian Duff, a political scientist at the University of New England in Maine.
Duff and other observers still say that the 72-year-old Collins, who was first elected to the Senate in 1996 and who plans to run again next year for a sixth term, keeps winning in a state that leans Democratic because she has built a reputation in Maine as a pragmatist who picks her fights carefully. “She’s a good politician, that’s the essence of Collins,” said Duff. “You can hear people voice a very cynical view of that. She’s very hard to pin down. But the way Collins conducts herself in Congress gives enough people in Maine the impression that she is earnest.”
But Collins is now in maybe the biggest trouble of her political career. Facing re-election in 2026, her poll numbers in the state are terrible, with one April survey showing that 71% of Maine voters don’t believe she deserves another Senate term.
Collins is caught between Republican base voters, especially in rural northern Maine, who think she is not sufficiently loyal to Trump, and Democrats and independents throughout the rest of the state who are angry that she has not stood up to Trump enough. The mounting Democratic anger against Collins came through loud and clear in April when she posted a photo of the North Bridge at Concord, Massachusetts, and excerpted Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Concord Hymn about the shot heard round the world to mark the 250th anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord. “Do Something Susan!” said one commentator on Collins’ post. “You clearly would have been a loyalist not a patriot,” added another.
Several political analysts in the state cautioned against writing her political obituary, however, because she has a track record of pulling out victories after bad early polling. She always seems to get just enough voters from both sides to trust her. “The further you are from buying a car the better a Ferrari looks,” said Philip Harriman, a former Republican state senator in Maine. “But the closer you are to buying and paying for it a Ford looks better.”
