Sen. Susan Collins and President Donald Trump are clashing over the president’s decision to not spend funds appropriated by Congress.

Collins said Tuesday that the administration is illegally usurping Congress’ power to decide what to spend money on, and she is considering legal action to stop the White House.

However, Daniel Schuman, head of the American Governance Institute, a nonprofit that supports a strong legislative branch, said Collins could’ve used her influence as head of the Appropriations Committee to do more to prevent Trump from withholding funds.

“They’ve had two years of the Trump administration,” he said. “There could’ve been a provision that addressed this.”

In an interview, Collins said her committee has already taken unprecedented steps to try to prevent the Trump administration from undermining Congress’ spending decisions. To do more to stop the maneuver employed by the president this week Collins said the Appropriations Committee would have had to get approval from the Budget Committee, which she said has authority over the relevant law.

The Trump administration held back $4.9 billion in congressionally approved spending in 2025 using the same mechanism his office is employing now, which it calls a pocket rescission. Collins said that after that, she tried to persuade the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to sue but was unsuccessful.

On Friday, the administration announced that it is canceling $810 million. The end of the federal fiscal year tomorrow is the last chance the funds could be spent.

Collins said she’s asking the GAO again to file a lawsuit.

“Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law,” she said in a statement shortly after the administration announced the rescissions.

The five-term senator is walking a tightrope when it comes to her relationship with Trump. In her reelection campaign, Collins says she acts independently whenever necessary, and Trump is unpopular in Maine. But she has voted for his nominees, who are the architects of the spending cancellations that she says are illegal.

By law, Schuman said, “Congress is the place where Americans come together and make decisions about how we’re going to run our country.”

He said instead, with the president canceling spending he doesn’t like, Trump can decide whom he wants to help or punish. If Maine wants funding for highways or health programs or anything else, “they’ll have to go like a supplicant to the president and hope he does what they need, knowing he can take it away at any moment for no reason at all.”

In her statement, Collins said the White House’s move came “without warning,” though Politico reported in June that the nominee to serve as the deputy director of the White House budget office, Hal Duncan, told Congress in his confirmation hearing that he wouldn’t rule out another pocket rescission this year, and he defended the legality of it.

Collins voted to confirm him, a vote she said was part of a package of nominees. She also voted to confirm his boss, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, in 2025. Vought made it clear before Trump returned to office that he thought presidents should have more control over spending, and laid out how to do it, including through the kind of maneuver Collins is now objecting to.

The GAO has said the maneuver is illegal, though last year, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed it to proceed and did not rule on its legality.

Of the $810 million Trump announced that he’s rescinding, the largest portion would have supported a variety of nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations that work on health and human services. 

The rest of the money would have funded grants and fellowships for foreign university students and faculty; groups that provide housing support; and programs focused on supporting migrants, lifting up minorities or addressing climate change. The administration said the funding paid for “pro-illegal immigration programs,” “stoked racial tensions,” and “propagated America Last climate alarmism,” among other things. 

Collins’ objections focus on the mechanism for peeling back the spending, not the nature of the grantees.

“There may be some funding here that is not needed,” she said.

But what the Office of Management and Budget should have done, “is come to us and ask for the money to be transferred to a higher, better use, or asked us to approve in the proper way a rescission of the funds, and it didn’t do so.”

Going forward, Collins said there are mechanisms she’s exploring to restore the funding and allow Congress to act on it.

The pocket rescission isn’t the only current clash between Collins and the Trump administration over spending controls. The White House wants influence over who gets medical research money. Last week, Collins led the charge to get the White House to drop a planned executive order on it, Semafor reported, and she worked with Democrats in August to block a regulation on the politicization of research funds. The jostling on the issue is not finished.

Congressional Republicans acknowledged this week that Trump repeatedly refusing to spend money Congress allocated will make it harder for the parties to compromise on spending bills in the future.