ATLANTA (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday that he will nominate Doug Collins to head the Department of Veterans Affairs in his recent administration.
Here are five things to know about the former Republican congressman from Georgia, who would lead the agency tasked with providing health care to former U.S. military personnel:
Collins is a Baptist minister who served in the Naval and Air Force Reserves
Collins, 58, has a master’s degree in theology from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and was a church pastor for 11 years. He served as a U.S. Navy chaplain for two years in the tardy 1980s. After the September 11 attacks, he joined the U.S. Air Force Reserve as a chaplain. Collins was stationed at Balad Air Base, Iraq, for five months in 2008. He remains a colonel in the Air Force Reserve. Collins continued to practice law until adulthood.
Collins’ political career was marked by representing one of Georgia’s most conservative regions
Collins was elected to the Georgia State House of Representatives in 2007 and served three two-year terms. During one of those terms, he served as caucus chairman for Gov. Nathan Deal, a fellow northeast Georgian, and helped negotiate a budget cut that preserved Georgia’s lottery-funded HOPE scholarship program at a time when officials feared it would go bankrupt and unable to pay the promised tuition fees for all beneficiaries.
Collins won a congressional seat in 2012, representing northeast Georgia’s 9th Congressional District, one of the most Republican districts in the country. The former incumbent, Tom Graves, was drawn to a recent district in northwest Georgia when the state added a 14th congressional seat due to population growth.
Despite his right-wing positions, Collins faced solemn primaries in 2016 from other Republicans who claimed he wasn’t conservative enough. During his time in Congress, Collins rose to become vice chairman of the House Republican Conference, the fifth-highest position in Republican Party leadership.
Collins gained national attention when he defended Trump in the Mueller investigation
Collins rose to national prominence defending Trump as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee while special counsel Robert Mueller was investigating whether Russia improperly influenced Trump’s 2016 election victory.
Collins wrote a book about Trump’s first impeachment over allegations that he wrongly withheld military aid to Ukraine in order to get Ukraine to announce an investigation into Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in 2020. The book “The Clock and the Calendar” argued that Democrats impeached Trump to avenge his victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to prevent him from being re-elected in 2020.
“From the moment the majority party won in this House, the inevitability that we would be here today was just a matter of when they would schedule it. Nothing else,” Collins said in the House of Representatives in 2019 as lawmakers debated before voting to impeach Trump.
Trump wanted Collins appointed to the US Senate
Trump was unhappy when Collins was not appointed to the U.S. Senate in 2019 when incumbent Republican Johnny Isakson resigned due to health problems. Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, decided to appoint Kelly Loeffler instead, but not before a last-minute push by anti-abortion groups and those close to Trump to undermine Loeffler’s appointment.
Collins ran for the Senate anyway, placing third in a bipartisan special election in November 2020, where he was defeated by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Loeffler and Democrat Raphael Warnock competed in a runoff election in January, in which Warnock defeated Loeffler. Warnock won a full term in 2022 by defeating another Trump favorite, football star Herschel Walker.
Collins still has a possible political future in Georgia
Collins refrained from challenging Kemp or running for Senate in 2022, but said, “It’s a goodbye for now, but probably not forever.” Collins helped represent Trump in challenging the results of the 2020 election in Georgia , and became chairman of the Trump-affiliated America First Policy Institute in Georgia. He repeatedly spoke at Trump rallies in Georgia during the 2024 campaign. But if Collins becomes Veterans Affairs secretary, he may be less likely to run for the office in 2026, when Georgia’s other Democratic senator, Jon Ossoff, is running for re-election.
