The F-35 Was in Trouble. Collins Was in Luck.

The Pentagon's most troubled fighter jet was about to get a bad report card, and the money arrived exactly when it did.

"Sen. Collins did not support the F-35 because of donations that she received."

— Phoebe Keller, spokesperson for the Senate Appropriations Committee

In May 2023, the F-35 was not having a moment. Already a decade late and nearly $200 billion over its original cost estimate, the Pentagon's flagship fighter was getting a fresh pile of bad news from its own government watchdog. The Government Accountability Office released a report detailing a cascade of new problems with the program. The agency criticized the Pentagon for bundling engine and cooling-system upgrades into the overall purchase of the aircraft, a move that, the GAO said, would limit congressional insight into cost increases. Then it criticized the contractors, headed by Lockheed Martin, for failing to deliver the jet on time.

For the woman who controls the money, that report was a problem. Senator Susan Collins of Maine was at the time the ranking member of the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, the post that shapes how the Pentagon actually spends its budget. She would have to vote on funding for new jets in a few months.

Which is exactly when the money started to arrive.

Federal Election Commission data shows that between May 1 and June 30, 2023, employees and top executives of Lockheed Martin donated $59,500 to Collins's campaign committee. The company was her largest single donor over those two months, and the blitz was the largest Lockheed had spent on Collins in the same window of any other year. Most of the gifts were under $1,000, the kind of check that reads as loyalty rather than leverage. But of the 60 donations of $1,000 or more made in May and June of 2023, 56 went to Collins.

Fifty-six of sixty.

In those same two months, Lockheed's corporate PAC doled out $421,000 in a bipartisan blitz that, according to OpenSecrets, was one of the largest coordinated lobbying efforts around that year's defense bill. Aside from the 2024 presidential election year, it outspend every subsequent year in the same period. The cash landed on a senator who was not even running for office.

Then, in July 2023, less than two months after the GAO report, Collins voted to appropriate funds to buy 83 new F-35 jets. When the final defense budget was signed into law later that year, she celebrated the economic boon for Maine, a state where Lockheed claims the program has had a nine-figure economic impact. Defense contracts have a way of finding the states of the members who fund them.

In response to questions from The Intercept, Phoebe Keller, a spokesperson for the Republican-controlled Senate Appropriations Committee, said Collins's support for the jet had nothing to do with Lockheed's donations. "The F-35 jet program is a longstanding bipartisan defense priority," she wrote, adding that Collins has always supported the program, "as dozens of both Republican and Democratic Senators."

Translation: a bipartisan priority that happens to concentrate its employee checks on one subcommittee's ranking member.

Analyst Dan Grazier told The Intercept that Collins's position on the defense appropriations panel likely played a role in the outsized donations. He didn't have to speculate for long, because the pattern repeated.

The thing is, the jet is still in trouble. In July of this year, the Pentagon barred the release of the GAO's annual F-35 report, marking it controlled unclassified information with no current plan to be released to the public. A previously released 2026 assessment found that only one in four F-35s is fully mission-capable. The Pentagon, the GAO wrote, had paid its contractor "hundreds of millions in incentives since 2020" to improve F-35 readiness, and those incentives "haven't been effective." The Pentagon declined to comment on the block.

The program's report card is now classified. The program's profits, meanwhile, remain public and keep finding their way to the same zip codes.

The fresh scrutiny arrived at the worst possible moment: the final weeks of what The Intercept calls the biggest fight of Collins's political career, her race against Democratic challenger Troy Jackson. Last month, ProPublica reported that the FBI had been investigating an alleged pay-to-play scheme in which a former defense contractor told federal agents he worked with figures tied to Collins to disguise campaign donations, and got federal contracts totaling $32 million in return. The probe, per ProPublica, fizzled after Trump returned to office and purged the bureau.

On October 14, more than 250 Mainers sent a letter to Attorney General Aaron Frey asking his office to investigate, arguing that a state election-law statute applies to federal officials as well. Among the signees was former state Public Advocate Bill Harwood. "I think we live in unprecedented times," he said. "If the federal government isn't going to do its job, then we need somebody to do it." Retired attorney Janis Cohen offered the version the senator's office would presumably welcome: "If there was no foul deed, terrific, and then everybody will know that."

Earlier this month, attorney Valerie Adams filed a formal ethics complaint against Collins with the Senate Select Committee on Ethics. The election is November 3. The letter's signees don't expect the investigation to finish before then.

The Lockheed episode is not the only time this has played out. Earlier this month, The Intercept reported that employees of AM General, another defense contractor, donated $58,000 to Collins-linked committees after a damning Army assessment put its federal contracts in jeopardy. Then there is the Ripsaw. Last year the Army canceled its plans to buy the robotic combat vehicle from Textron's Maine subsidiary, Howe & Howe, and Collins spent the season calling the decision "terribly unfair and a real mistake." Around her vote on the 2026 defense budget, Textron's PAC contributed $11,000 to Collins-linked committees, and Textron and subsidiary employees gave nearly $15,000 between September 2025 and October 2026.

William Hartung, a defense spending analyst, put it plainly: "A lot of members lobby to get more units of something built in their state, or craft legislation for a system that only their local firm can produce. It's kind of business as usual, but sometimes business as usual causes great harm."

Collins denies wrongdoing, and nothing in the FEC records proves a deal was struck. The money in those filings is not evidence of corruption. It is the receipt of a system in which the watchdog report arrives, the checks arrive, the vote arrives, and only then, three years later, the jet's report card arrives again and gets locked in a drawer.

The F-35 was in trouble in 2023, and it is in trouble now. The contractor that builds it paid one senator more than anyone else in the exact weeks its case was weakest, and she is running for office in the state that profits from the outcome. In Maine, luck has a last name, and it's on the ballot in November.