Wayne Clark of Durham is an eighth-generation Mainer, a retired public relations and marketing executive and author of The Blue Yankee on Substack.

Sen. Susan Collins keeps reminding us how much money she brings into Maine. That money comes from congressional “earmarks” (sometimes known as “pork”). She says she has brought in $1.5 billion over the past five years.

There’s another side to the ledger, though: how much has Sen. Collins’ subservience to Donald Trump and the GOP cost Maine?

Collins (and, to be fair, most of her colleagues) did not lift a finger to stop DOGE, illegal tariffs, illegal wars, deteriorating foreign relations and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Nor has she tried to rein in Trump. Can we afford the cost of her votes and inaction?

First, let’s do a numbers check.

Collins brought in $200 million worth of pork in 2022, $308 million in 2023, $576 million in 2024, $0 in 2025 (no earmarks for anyone that year due to the continuing resolution) and $428.6 million in 2026. So, the average per year over the past five years is roughly $302 million. Against that $302 million number, let’s look at how much Collins’ and Congress’ inaction and obedience to Trump has cost Mainers.

The Maine Center for Economic Policy reports that the total tariffs collected by Trump in the first year equal about $1,100 per household. In Maine, that translates to a total of $677 million. And that’s just one year. Most of that has been paid by Mainers in the form of higher prices.

The budget bill imposed new work requirements on Medicaid recipients (even though most already work). Maine DHHS estimates that 30,000 Mainers are expected to lose coverage in the first year alone because they can’t navigate the reporting requirements. Just administering the work requirement paperwork will cost Maine $8 million in year one, and $5.5 million per year thereafter.

Trump and the GOP declined to extend the tax subsidies that made coverage under the Affordable Care Act actually affordable for many people. A report from Defend America Action says that Mainers who buy health insurance through the ACA exchange will see their coverage costs for next year increase as much as $900 per month.

The budget bill adds a work requirement to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and reduces the federal contribution to the costs of running the program. Total loss of money to Maine? $145 million per year.

Those people who are losing Medicaid coverage and many of the ones losing their ACA subsidies will be uninsured. That hits our hospitals: the loss of coverage will cost Maine hospitals $66 million per year, and free care is expected to go up by $86 million per year by 2034.

Canadian tourism is down 40%, as a result of tariffs and Trump’s insulting behavior toward Canada. In 2024, Canadians spent about $500 million in Maine. So that means Trump and the Congress that let him get away with tariffs and bad behavior cost our tourism sector about $200 million in just one year.

The combination of tariffs and the Iran war have skyrocketed our costs. Coffee is up, beef is up. Gas is up by nearly a dollar in Maine, and it has been up as much as $1.40 a gallon. The war Collins didn’t vote against nine times has cost everyone at the pumps.

Now, I wouldn’t add up the numbers above and pretend to have an accurate, defensible total. But it doesn’t take long to overtop Collins’ $302 million of pork. In fact, the Maine Center for Economic Policy totals the cost to Maine just from the budget bill at $400 million per year.

That’s a lot of money talk. The human costs are harder to quantify, but they’re very real. It seems to me we simply can’t afford six more years of this. Pork or not, we can’t afford Susan Collins.