Augusta, ME – Today, new revelations surfaced about Susan Collins taking money from a defense contractor that received federal funding from the Appropriations Committee even after the Army declared that it did not need any more of the vehicle the company produced. According to the report, the donations from the defense contractor – totaling almost $60,000 after the Army announcement – demonstrate “how Collins’s campaign account has grown with help from employees at defense contractors doing business with the government.”

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The Intercept: Susan Collins’s Committee Bought Trucks the Army Didn’t Want. Then Campaign Donations Poured In.

• The U.S. Army announced last year that it had enough of a specific model of armored vehicle and that any more deliveries would be “excess.” But even so, Congress found a way to keep funding alive for the vehicle — and executives at the company that produces the vehicle found a way to flood key members of Congress with campaign donations.

• In the weeks after this year’s appropriations bill passed, employees of AM General or its parent company donated tens of thousands to key appropriations committee members in both chambers, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif.

• Collins is separately facing scrutiny over a report from ProPublica that the FBI investigated an alleged pay-to-play scheme involving a major donor, an ex-defense contractor. Collins’ office denied that there was any kind of pay-to-play arrangement and said she fully cooperated with the FBI…the giving nonetheless demonstrates how Collins’s campaign account has grown with help from employees at defense contractors doing business with the government.

• Before the Army put the future of the vehicle in jeopardy, Collins was not a frequent beneficiary of contributions from the company’s workers. She last received campaign funds from AM General or its parent company’s employees more than a decade ago. But after the Army’s “excess” announcement last year, employees and the company’s PAC donated over $58,000 to committees associated with Collins.

• One observer of money in politics said that appropriators receiving money from government contractors is a long-standing problem.

• “Government contractors today routinely try to leverage a broken campaign finance system to their advantage.”

• “Members of the appropriations committees in Congress are extremely powerful. These lawmakers can steer huge sums of money to private companies. Government contractors today routinely try to leverage a broken campaign finance system to their advantage,” said Michael Beckel, money in politics reform director at Issue One. […]

• AM General is most famous for producing the Humvee, the iconic military vehicle that trawled the streets of Baghdad during the Iraq War. In 2023, the Army selected the company to produce 20,000 units of a more heavily armored successor known as the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. The company was ramping up its production line in Indiana when then-Army Secretary Dan Driscoll announced in May 2025 that he would cancel its order, saying the additional deliveries would result in an “excess.”

• Driscoll’s announcement was part of a larger effort to “eliminate waste and obsolete programs.”

• “Yesterday’s weapons will not win tomorrow’s wars,” he said.

• The military does not always have the last say on its contracts, however.

• Congress has for decades swooped in to save pricey programs with political appeal. Soon after the Army moved to kill the vehicle contract, Congress mobilized to save it. […]

• By the time the final version of the defense spending bill passed this February, the Army had been provided with $345 million for procurement of a vehicle it said it did not need.

• Collins’s campaign committees had received some money after the Army announced that it wanted to cancel the project.

• In the weeks after Congress passed the appropriations bill on February 3, Collins and one of her counterparts in the House, Rep. Ken Calvert, both received a burst of donations from AM General employees and the company’s political action committee.

• After the appropriations bill went through, donors associated with AM General gave a total of $50,000 to Collins’s fundraising committees.

• The donors included Chadbourne, the company’s CEO, and two of KPS Capital’s managing partners. (Private equity firm KPS Capital Partners acquired AM General in 2020.) All gave money to a committee raising money on Collins’s behalf at the end of February or start of March. […]

• On her campaign website, Collins notes that she serves as chair of the “powerful” appropriations committee.

• “This committee decides how federal dollars are spent each year, from national defense and infrastructure to medical research, education, and public safety. Susan’s position gives Maine an outsized voice at the table when critical decisions are made which allows her to deliver serious results for Maine,” her website states. […]

• Government contractors have been banned from donating directly to candidates for decades. In practice, however, that ban does nothing to prevent company PACs or individual employees from giving to campaigns — even if they serve as company executives.

• The contributions associated with AM General represent a sliver of the $15.8 million Collins had raised this election cycle through July, according to data compiled by the watchdog group OpenSecrets. Yet every dollar could help her in what is expected to be a tough fight with Troy Jackson, the Democratic Senate candidate with a slight lead on her in recent polls, in November.

• The contributions also illustrated a trend among the top contributors to her campaign. Many of them are from people affiliated with government contractors, according to OpenSecrets. Two defense contractors, General Dynamics and RTX, are also on the list of her top organizational contributors.

• AM General’s owner, KPS Capital Partners, is the sixth-largest organizational donor to Collins’s campaign committee and leadership PAC, according to the group’s data.