The Kennedy Center has financially collapsed in the 19 months since Donald Trump took control.
The venerated performing arts space is “in free fall,” having already bled dry most of its cash reserves, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Kennedy Center was a dying relic that needs his name—and brand—to survive. But a Post analysis of the living memorial’s financials indicate that isn’t true. The center was more financially sound throughout the decade than it was most years before the pandemic. Its downward spiral began when Trump took the reins in February 2025.
“This was a pretty stable—large, complicated, but stable—organization,” Karen Gahl-Mills, an expert in arts management and director of the Indiana University arts administration program, told the Post. “It had a hard time during the pandemic, lots of people did. And it was pretty stable at September 30, 2024.”
The Kennedy Center did not turn a profit on its performances, but that was expected. The federal site is primarily a congressionally founded living memorial, as well as a nonprofit arts organization. Its lifeblood were ticket sales and donations.
But both of those stopped when Trump needled his way onto the center’s board and into its programming.
“The burst happened up the pipe,” Andrew Taylor, who directs the arts management program at American University, told the Post. “The water stopped flowing into the organization because of the choices the administration was making.”
Most of the people in charge of procuring donor money were let go by Trump officials. Richard Grenell, a political consultant and Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence, was in charge of the center in March when he announced that the center’s development staff had been cut from 94 to 16 people.
The center’s latest tax filing revealed more issues, including a $48 million write-off for pledges that it no longer believes it can collect, according to documents reviewed by the Post.
“This is unusual, that this organization has gone this far south, this fast,” Gahl-Mills told the paper. “It’s not the thing we typically see. It is an organization clearly in distress.”
The Kennedy Center has also chewed through most of its debt reserves, which are projected to hit $9 million by the end of the week—an enormous sink from the $18 million recorded this time last year. That would suggest the space is already scraping the bottom of the barrel for cash to spend, as almost the entire remaining sum is collateral for the loan on the Reach, the center’s 2019 expansion.
Another indicator of the center’s waning health is its recent decision to dip into the endowment for the Washington National Opera, a donation tranche that has historically been untouched.
But its financials are only expected to get worse: The center expects ticket sales to plummet by about two-thirds this year. Gift sales were also down: in Ihe first quarter of 2026, donations fell by about 40 percent compared to the last four months of 2025, according to an internal report obtained by the Post in June.
Meanwhile, Trump is still scheming to affix his name to the property. After a vote to protect federal memorials failed to pass the Senate on Monday, Justice Department attorneys echoed Trump’s claims in court, arguing in a legal filing that “without appropriate recognition” of Trump, “the Kennedy Center will be back where it was at the beginning—a financially insolvent facility and a decrepit, dilapidated, crumbling building, that is bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and that continues to race toward physical and financial ruin.”
