“Pressure campaign from her G.O.P. colleagues and the White House might have been the key factor.”
Augusta, Maine – In case you missed it, new reporting from Puck is highlighting how Susan Collins’ “succumbed” to a “pressure campaign from her G.O.P. colleagues and the White House” to pull her own amendment to Republicans’ rescissions package that reportedly would have tanked the overall bill and would have been a “defeat for the president.”
Puck: The Collins Pressure Campaign
By Leigh Ann Caldwell
July 21, 2025
After Sen. Susan Collins’ eleventh-hour decision to not put forth an amendment slimming down the $9 billion rescission package, she blamed a “political stunt” from Democrats for her change of heart. But a subtle pressure campaign from her G.O.P. colleagues and the White House might have been the key factor.
In the hours-long “vote-a-rama” ahead of the rescissions vote on Wednesday night into Thursday morning, Sen. Susan Collins authored an amendment that would have slimmed down the cuts in the measure from $9 billion to about $6.5 billion by restoring funding for global health programs and the U.S. Institute of Peace. It also would have reinstated most—about $1 billion—of the funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports NPR and PBS.
Collins, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, had the votes, multiple sources told me. Republican Senators Thom Tillis, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell were going to support her amendment, and Democratic leadership had whipped their members to vote for it, too. Democrats, obviously, vehemently disagreed with the rescissions but decided to help make the cuts smaller.
And, in truth, Collins had succumbed to a subtle pressure campaign to get her to drop the amendment.
Neither Trump nor White House aides contacted the senator directly, but they dispatched allies, namely Sens. Markwayne Mullin and Eric Schmitt, to talk to her at length about the consequences of slimming down the rescissions package, multiple Hill sources told me. Collins wasn’t swayed by their argument that the White House needed to keep the cuts at $9 billion; what moved her instead was their appeal to party unity [...]
Plus, Politico dropped a story on Wednesday concerning the White House’s conversations about who should run for Senate in Maine, amid speculation (which I wrote about last week) that Collins might retire. [...] It was a well-placed dig at a critical time. It worked.
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