President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday that he would appoint Doug Collins to lead the Veterans Affairs Department in his new administration. If Collins becomes Veterans Affairs secretary, he would lead the agency tasked with providing health care to former members of the U.S. armed forces.
Collins, a native of Gainesville, is well-known throughout political circles and in Northeast Georgia. He was elected to the first of his three terms in the Georgia state legislature in 2007 and was Gov. Nathan Deal’s floor leader during one of those terms.
In 2012, Collins was elected to Congress in northeast Georgia’s conservative 9th Congressional District. While in Congress, Collins rose to vice chair of the House Republican Conference, the fifth-highest post in GOP leadership. He acquired a national reputation while defending Trump as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee during the Robert Mueller investigation.
After Gov. Kemp passed on appointing him to the U.S. Senate in 2019 when Johnny Isakson stepped down
Collins launched an unsuccessful bid for Senate the following year.
He returned home from Washington and, in 2021, joined the Clarkesville-based law firm of Oliver and Weidner. Collins passed on challenging Kemp for governor or running for the Senate in 2022 but said, “This is goodbye for now, but probably not forever.”
From the pulpit into politics
Since leaving Washington, Collins has remained active in politics. He helped represent Trump in challenging the results of the 2020 election in Georgia and became the Georgia chair of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, according to AP. Collins repeatedly spoke at Trump rallies in Georgia during the 2024 campaign.
The 58-year-old former congressman holds a master’s degree in divinity from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He pastored a church for 11 years before becoming a lawyer. Collins served as a U.S. Navy chaplain for two years in the late 1980s. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he joined the U.S. Air Force Reserve as a chaplain and deployed to Balad Air Force Base in Iraq for five months in 2008. He remains a colonel in the Air Force Reserve.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
