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Leaders of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts say it is reportedly on the brink of bankruptcy and could close as early as Tuesday.
The center’s Donald Trump-installed leaders argued that putting the president’s name on its facade may be the only way to avoid imminent and “certain fiscal collapse”, the Washington Post first reported, citing documents it obtained.
The paper said a report, prepared by the Washington DC institution’s trustees, claimed that within a few weeks the institution won’t be able to pay employees or meet maintenance costs. The report was prepared in advance of a meeting that is scheduled for Tuesday. The 57-page internal document, circulated to the board ahead of the meeting, also flagged safety concerns tied to the building’s maintenance backlog and recommended that the main building be closed immediately.
Reached for comment by the Guardian, the Kennedy Center declined to address the leaked documents directly or to get ahead of the board’s deliberations. It pointed instead to a statement issued after part of the ceiling in the main hall collapsed on 4 September.
“Another example of the urgent need to close for renovation and revitalization, as our Chairman President Trump has championed,” said Roma Daravi, the center’s vice-president of public relations, in the statement. “This structural failure stems from decades of neglect and deferred maintenance by the previous leadership, and there’s no justification for further delays in restoring America’s cultural center.”
The Post also said Trump will help the Kennedy Center if his involvement is acknowledged. The trustees’ report represents “a remarkable new phase in Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, which has been engulfed by financial turmoil, leadership upheaval and litigation since he installed himself” as chair in 2025, the paper said.
That takeover began on 10 February 2025, when Trump dismissed 18 board members appointed under Joe Biden. Days later, the remaining trustees – many of them recently installed Trump allies, including White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and second lady Usha Vance – voted him in as chair, breaking with decades of precedent under which sitting presidents had kept the institution at arm’s length. The board also fired Deborah Rutter, who had served as the center’s president since 2014 and already planned to step down seven months later, replacing her with Richard Grenell, a Trump ally from his first administration.
The shake-up prompted a wave of departures and cancellations. Board treasurer Shonda Rhimes, National Symphony Orchestra artistic adviser Ben Folds and opera singer Renée Fleming all resigned their positions, while actor Issa Rae pulled her sold-out show from the venue in protest. Subscription sales fell sharply over the following months, with the Post citing a 36% drop by June 2025, and ticket sales continued to soften into the autumn. A Kennedy Center spokesperson attributed the decline to wider Broadway industry trends, though sales had already begun falling within months of the takeover, before those pressures were cited, and alongside a wave of artist departures and cancellations.
Grenell himself was replaced as president in March by Matt Floca, formerly the center’s vice-president of facilities operations, amid the continued upheaval.
The Post also noted that Trump’s involvement with the Kennedy Center, which included the addition of his name to the building, impaired fundraising work and ticket sales. A spokesperson disputed this, saying the name had instead attracted new donors and was “crucial” to fundraising, which goes against the trustees’ report’s own admission that Trump is withholding his fundraising help until his name returns.
A judge in May ruled that the addition of Trump’s name to the center’s facade was illegal – and therefore it needed to be removed. Trump’s name was then removed in June after a judge rejected an emergency appeal blocking the removal.
In August, the board voted again to reinstate Trump’s name on the building and to close the venue for a multiyear renovation, according to court filings.
A spokesperson said the center had historically run an operating deficit of about $100m a year, and that prior leadership left a bottom-line deficit of $26m, describing the previous budget as “falsified”. This echoes an allegation Grenell made in 2025, when he said the center’s new CFO had found “$26m in phantom revenue” and called it “criminal”, a claim Rutter and Rubenstein rejected at the time, with Rubenstein saying the center’s financial reports “were reviewed and approved by the Kennedy Center’s audit committee and full board as well as a major accounting firm”.
Separately, lawyers for the center have argued in litigation that hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations already pledged would have to be returned if Trump’s name were not restored to the facade, citing the institution’s bylaws. The board later told a federal judge it would hold off on adding the name until at least 8 October, a month’s delay on its earlier timetable.
Reuters contributed reporting.
