ATLANTA — President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday that he would appoint Doug Collins to lead the Veterans Affairs Department in his new 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 members of the U.S. armed forces:
Collins is a Baptist minister who has served in the Navy and Air Force Reserve
Collins, 58, holds a master's degree in divinity from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and pastored a church for 11 years. He 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. Collins deployed to Balad Air Force Base in Iraq for five months in 2008. He remains a colonel in the Air Force Reserve. Collins became a lawyer well into adulthood.
Collins' political career was shaped representing one of Georgia's most conservative regions
Collins was elected to the Georgia state House in 2007 and served three two-year terms. He was a floor leader for Gov. Nathan Deal, a fellow northeast Georgian, for one of those terms, helping to broker a budget cut that kept Georgia's lottery-funded HOPE Scholarship program going at a time when leaders feared it would go bankrupt and not be able to pay promised college tuition for all beneficiaries.
Collins won a seat in Congress 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 into a new northwest Georgia district when the state added a 14th congressional seat because of population growth.
Despite his right-wing positions, Collins faced serious primary challenges in 2016 from other Republicans who claimed he wasn't conservative enough. While in Congress, Collins rose to vice chair of the House Republican Conference, the fifth-highest post in GOP leadership.
