Susan Collins Corruption & Ethics Maine

Susan Collins's Super PAC Chief Was Paid to Lobby on NIH Money for a Secret Group Named After Her Own Hearing

A group called Keeping America's Edge — named after an April 2025 hearing Collins chaired — paid about $850,000 to lobby on NIH funding, a budget Collins's committee writes. Scott Reed, who runs the super PAC re-electing her, got $250,000 of it. Nobody disclosed who was paying.

MAGA Report Cards · Oct 30, 2026

Susan Collins's Super PAC Chief Was Paid to Lobby on NIH Money for a Secret Group Named After Her Own Hearing — Photo: J. Scott Applewhite / AP, via Bangor Daily News

On April 30, 2025, Susan Collins chaired a Senate hearing called "Biomedical Research: Keeping America's Edge in Innovation." Nine days later, a brand-new group was set up with almost the same name: Keeping America's Edge.

Five days after that, the Bangor Daily News reports, the group hired a lobbying firm whose only lobbyist on the account was Scott Reed — the man who now runs the super PAC spending tens of millions of dollars to re-elect Collins.

The job: lobbying on "NIH Funding." The National Institutes of Health budget is written by the Senate Appropriations Committee. Collins chairs it.

A group that didn't exist for long

Keeping America's Edge was a strange outfit. According to the BDN:

It was set up on May 9, 2025, by a Republican political lawyer, and listed no directors.
It does not appear in IRS records for tax-exempt groups.
It told regulators it "has not commenced business" — and dissolved in July 2025.

But in that short life, it spent big. Reed's firm, Chesapeake Enterprises, reported $250,000 for its NIH work. In June 2025, the group added two more lobbying firms for $460,000 and $140,000. One of those firms' lobbyists is a former staff director of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee. All in, the BDN counted about $850,000 in lobbying fees.

Federal lobbying law requires firms to disclose any outside group that helps fund and direct their work. None of the three firms listed one. So the public still doesn't know who paid $850,000 to influence the NIH budget.

Brendan Fischer of the Campaign Legal Center told the BDN: "At worst, this use of an unknown [nonprofit] is intended to hide who is actually behind the lobbying effort."

The money that flowed back to Collins

While Reed's firm was lobbying for this group, the BDN reports, Reed gave Collins's campaign $7,000. In March 2026, the lobbyist from one of the other firms and a colleague gave Collins committees another $9,000.

Reed also chairs Pine Tree Results, a super PAC that has booked nearly $32 million in ads backing Collins.

And the same firm that took Reed's lobbying work, Chesapeake, paid Collins's husband, Tom Daffron, a consulting fee in 2025. Neither Reed nor Collins's office has said what he did for it or how much he was paid. We laid out that payment here.

What Collins's office says

The BDN found nothing showing Collins knew about the group or played a role in it. Her office said it had never heard of Keeping America's Edge until the paper asked.

Her spokesperson, Phoebe Keller, said: "None of these people lobbied our office about increasing NIH funding."

That doesn't answer the bigger question. A lobbyist who runs her super PAC, whose firm paid her husband, and who gave her campaign money, was paid by a nameless group named after her own hearing to work on a budget her committee controls. Even if every meeting happened somewhere else, every piece of it points back to her.

Reed's record with Collins

This isn't the first time Scott Reed's name has come up in a Collins money story. ProPublica reported in September that the FBI once looked into a large donation Reed solicited from Navatek, a Hawaii defense contractor whose former CEO is now in prison. We covered the Navatek story and how the probe died. Collins called that report a "smear job" and denied wrongdoing, as the BDN notes.

What the filings show

A group named after a hearing Susan Collins chaired paid about $850,000 to lobby on NIH funding — a budget her committee writes — and $250,000 of it went to the firm of Scott Reed, who runs the super PAC that has booked nearly $32 million in ads for her. The group listed no directors, never said who funded it, and dissolved within months. During that same stretch, Reed gave Collins's campaign $7,000, and his firm paid her husband a consulting fee that neither side will explain.