Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) finally has her dream job after nearly three decades in the Senate, and she’s not wasting any time using it.
Collins — who is up for reelection next year — has loaded up her panel’s FY2026 spending bills with more than $810 million in earmarks and directed spending for Maine. But that’s just a portion of how much federal money will flow into the Pine Tree State thanks to the veteran senator.
The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine — the U.S. Navy’s oldest shipyard — is in line to get $460 million in upgrades thanks to Collins. There’s tens of millions of dollars for the Maine fishing industry.
Collins has secured another $135 million in transportation earmarks, plus $59 million for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure projects. The University of Maine system gets $52 million. Lots of Mainers will be impacted by the federal spending — if it comes together.
Yet with the likelihood of a stopgap funding bill and possibly a government shutdown increasing, these Senate spending bills are at risk of falling by the wayside, which would hurt both parties politically. A CR won’t have earmarks, something Collins and other Senate appropriators are desperately trying to avoid for a second year in a row.
“I believe that members know far better than somebody who works in an office building or a federal agency in Washington and has never been to a member’s state which projects are worthy of support,” Collins said in a Wednesday interview.
Collins noted that earmarks and other funding requests are vetted carefully. Earmarks, aka “Congressionally Directed Spending,” only go to non-profit organizations and community groups. Lawmakers must declare they have no personal financial stake in the projects, and the earmarks are publicly disclosed.
“We get thousands — literally — of programmatic requests and [earmarks] in every state,” Collins added. “I see this as a tug of war between the executive branch and the legislative branch on directing funds.”
Collins also downplayed any suggestions that directing all this money back to Maine is simply designed to help a powerful politician get reelected to a sixth term.
“It really isn’t,” Collins insisted.
“We go through these projects very carefully. A lot of them are public-safety related. Fire stations or police communication networks. Also, the University of Maine system. Workforce programs. Child care. Ag research. Those projects make a big difference in a low-income state with a lot of infrastructure needs, as they do in a lot of other states across the nation.”
Sen. Jon Ossoff (Ga.) is the most vulnerable Senate Democrat this cycle, a freshman looking for another term in a state carried by President Donald Trump in November.
The 38-year-old Ossoff, top Democrat on the MilCon-VA subcommittee on Appropriations, wants to funnel hundreds of millions back home to Georgia. The MilCon-VA bill alone includes more than $550 million for Peach State military construction projects. Ossoff also has 88 earmarks worth nearly $79 million.
“The Senate bill would provide more military construction resources to the state of Georgia since 2010,” Ossoff told us. “I have worked relentlessly using this seat on the Appropriations Committee to deliver for Georgia. I always fight like hell for Georgia.”
So far this fiscal year, there are more than 2,000 earmarks in just five Senate-drafted bills, according to a Punchbowl News analysis. The total price tag for those earmarks: $5 billion-plus.
The Senate Appropriations Committee is marking up two FY2026 spending bills today — Defense and Labor-Health and Human Services.
GOP sources said that for these two bills alone, 95 senators submitted more than 11,000 funding requests to the Appropriations Committee. This gives you an idea of the stakes here.
If they’re approved as expected, these would be the seventh and eighth bills greenlighted by the panel, which is struggling to get back to regular order after Congress passed a long-term CR in March.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are trying to hash out a multi-bill package of appropriations measures and pass it before the August recess. There’s no deal yet, although it could come today (more below.).
Not everyone is on board with the earmark push. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who got into a closed-door spat with Collins at a GOP lunch meeting last week, is pushing to prevent senators from speaking publicly about earmarks.
Johnson wants a vote on an amendment that would automatically rescind a senator’s earmark if he or she publicly touts it in press releases, media appearances or elsewhere. Senators aren’t taking kindly to Johnson’s effort, so it’s unlikely to actually be enacted.
There was also a brutal partisan clash over a $9 billion rescissions package from the White House. This was approved on a party-line vote, and Democrats warn that if GOP leaders try this again, there’s no hope of any bipartisan funding deal.
And House Republicans are passing FY2026 appropriations bills at a drastically lower funding level than the Senate, basically what the White House requested in its “skinny” budget proposal. The higher level of spending called for by the Senate Appropriations Committee has angered some GOP conservatives like Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), an appropriator himself.
“The real underlying struggle here is people who want to reduce spending and people who really, really want to pass an appropriations bill, no matter what we have to give away,” Kennedy said. “I believed for a while we’re going to be governing through CRs and rescissions. That’s just the reality of it.”
