In 2019, Collins Super PAC head Scott Reed met at a D.C. coffee shop with three executives from Hawaiian defense contractor Navatek and asked them for a $500,000 contribution. The executives counter-offered—proposing an even bigger donation in return for tens of millions of dollars in federal defense contracts. They suggested obscuring the donation through a fake shell company called “the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers”—as it is extremely illegal for government contractors to make political donations and for Collins to exchange federal contracts for said donations.

The Collins PAC received $150,000 from Navatek CEO Martin Kao right after the meeting, and two months later he told the company that Collins committed to giving them $32 million in naval contracts. Kao was eventually federally charged for campaign finance crimes and loan defrauding in 2022, and faces years in prison. No one from Collins’s office was charged.

Edit: Post updated with better source.