What I'm hearing

✂️ Here's the state of play on the president's package of spending cuts.

◉ U.S. Sen. Susan Collins is back at the center of a major spending issue. The Senate Appropriations Committee that she leads now has to deal with President Donald Trump's proposal to claw back $9.4 billion in funding to health programs and public broadcasting.

◉ Top Republicans including Collins may look to amend it to protect programs they support, according to Politico. The Maine senator gave a closed-door presentation to her caucus on Wednesday outlining her problems with the bill, Punchbowl News reported.

◉ We already know what those concerns are, and they are pretty narrow. She spoke out at a hearing against cuts to PEPFAR, the global HIV/AIDS prevention program started under former President George W. Bush. She also told Maine Public that she wants to shield funding for local TV and radio stations.

◉ Roughly $1 billion is at stake for NPR and its member stations. Collins criticized NPR for a "partisan bent" but noted that it only gets $4 million of the money at stake in the president's rescissions package. Maine Public has said 12 percent of its budget is at risk.

◉ "NPR should be providing the kind of neutral coverage that Maine Public, for the most part, does provide," Collins told the Maine affiliate earlier this month.

◉ Collins is not alone on these items. More conservative senators from rural states including Alaska and South Dakota oppose the cuts to local NPR affiliates that serve as staples in the most remote parts of the country.

◉ Everyone is under the gun here. If Congress doesn't act by July 18, the Trump administration will have to spend the money it wants to cut. If the bill fails, the White House will "go nuts," Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana told Politico, underscoring the stakes for Republicans to resolve it quickly.

◉ The question is whether Trump will swallow major changes to his plan or whether the White House can win enough support to pass it around Collins' opposition. It did just that with the "One Big Beautiful Bill" that the Maine senator criticized for its effects on the state's rural health care system.

◉ "Unfortunately, they felt unable to accommodate my concerns, because they would have lost votes on the other side," Collins told WGAN last week, detailing conversations with Vice President JD Vance and other top Republicans.

◉ Democrats are still trying hard to make Collins wear the effects of that bill going into her 2026 election year. She and her allies have countered by pointing to her lobbying to insert a $50 billion fund for rural hospitals. It's a precarious balance right now, but that's normal for Collins in the Trump era.

Reading list

🫴 Planned Parenthood wants money from Maine to offset Medicaid cuts from Trump's megabill.

The other side: "It’s good to have allies in Washington DC again!" the evangelical Christian Civic League of Maine responded to the news on Facebook.

📦 Look behind the scenes at what it took to bring Amazon to Maine.

What they're saying: “I told Gary, ‘You need to come up here. This is Amazon we’re dealing with,’” said Pam Wilcox, who manages the property for owner Gary Gagnon. said. “He’s like, ‘What? Amazon coming to Caribou?’”

🖨️ Brewer is on track to get Maine's first 3D-printed home village.

☀️ From the Portland Press Herald: Maine's solar installers are planning an end-of-year sprint because a federal tax credit is ending.

👎 An Aroostook school district that never shot down a budget has now voted down two.

🎤 This Old Town teen spoke at a Senate hearing on diabetes research.

News and notes

🎺 The former governor trumpeted the first fundraising haul of his new campaign.

◉ Former Gov. Paul LePage raised $550,000 just under two months into his campaign against U.S. Rep. Jared Golden of Maine's 2nd District, the challenger's campaign said Wednesday. It did not release cash on hand ahead of the July 15 deadline to report to the Federal Election Commission.

◉ This is over the $500,000 benchmark that I set for his campaign in this newsletter. Former Rep. Bruce Poliquin raised $880,000 in his opening quarter when he faced Golden in 2021, although that came three months closer to Election Day.

◉ Team LePage compared his haul favorably to Golden's in the first quarter of this year. But Golden raised $820,000 in the second quarter and has $1 million on hand, making for a large head start on the former governor.

◉ Campaigns and donors care about the fundraising gaps between candidates, but they don't matter a ton at this early stage. These guys are in one of the biggest races on the House map, and chances are that they will have the money and air support to run strong campaigns.

On the move