Collins votes against restoring Maine’s NIH research grants

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) voted against reinstating medical research grants in Maine, even after she urged the White House to restore some of them.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) froze $1.5 billion in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants on Jan. 28, including $323,000 to study rural health care in Maine and $1.5 million for the Mount Desert Island Biological Lab in Bar Harbor.

“Here in Maine, we do first-class biomedical research that saves lives and produces new breakthroughs in cancer, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s,” Dr. Clifford Rosen wrote in the Portland Press Herald when the freeze was announced. “I can unequivocally state that loss of indirect revenues through these cuts will have a chilling effect on our Maine research enterprise.”

Some of these funds were awarded directly by NIH, while others were appropriated by Congress.

Multiple lawsuits have challenged the funding freeze, including one joined by Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey. In response, federal judges have ordered hundreds of research grants to be restored. The White House has complied with some of these rulings and appealed others, creating confusion over which grants are active and which remain on hold.

On July 24, Collins and her Republican colleagues on the Appropriations Committee sent a letter to OMB Director Russell Vought asking him to release the NIH grants that had been appropriated by Congress.

A memo later circulated within OMB indicating that the appropriated grants would be released, but not in full and with new limits on how the funds could be used. This only added to the confusion surrounding the status of NIH grants.

Less than 72 hours later, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) introduced an amendment to the 2026 budget aimed at fully restoring the frozen grants. Every Republican on the Appropriations Committee, including Collins, voted against it.

“Nine hundred NIH awards to Northwestern have been frozen or terminated,” Durbin told his colleagues. “This includes research into the world’s smallest pacemaker for newborns with a congenital heart defect. That is the number one congenital heart illness that infants face in America.”

The Government Accountability Office has since determined that the Trump administration broke the law when it ordered the funding freeze.

Collins is the only Republican senator representing a state that President Donald Trump lost in 2024. She voted on Feb. 6 to confirm Vought as OMB Director, despite his being one of the authors of Project 2025, which explicitly called for NIH cuts.

Collins is expected to seek a sixth term in the Senate next year and is widely regarded as the most vulnerable Republican incumbent.