In the 19 months since President Donald Trump took over the Kennedy Center, the institution has borrowed everything its bank would lend it, dipped into money donors had given on the condition it never be spent and written off pledges from supporters who stopped paying, according to confidential board documents and tax filings reviewed by The Washington Post.
The Kennedy Center was solvent when Trump took over. Then its finances collapsed.
The Post examined 15 years of the institution’s financial records to see why it went south after the president took over.
$500 million
Includes $257 million from
Congress for building renovation
Government
grants
Includes $25 million from
federal stimulus package
$250m
Gifts, grants
Ticket sales,
other
revenue
0
2011
2013
2015
2017
2019
2021
2023
2025
Income by source
Note: Excludes investment income and other revenue such as parking and restaurants. Showing fiscal years ending in late September.
Source: 990 forms via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer (2011-2024) and the Kennedy Center (2025)
and
Trump said the center was “losing hundreds of millions of dollars” when he took over, and his board has warned of “bankruptcy.”
It is true that when Trump took over, the center was in worse shape than it was in 2021, when it was flush with pandemic relief funds. But the old leadership handed over an institution that was better off financially than in most years before covid-19.
Cash and “rainy day fund” dwindle
Sustainability
funds
$21m
59m
53m
Cash
$41m
29m
11m
25m
24m
21m
19m
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
Note: Cash is money in the bank at the end of each fiscal year, excluding $9 million held as collateral for a loan. The sustainability funds are a reserve the board can spend at its discretion. Fiscal years end in late September.
Source: Kennedy Center audited financial statements, FY21 to FY24
“This was a pretty stable — large, complicated, but stable — organization,” said Karen Gahl-Mills, an expert in arts management and director of the Indiana University arts administration program. “It had a hard time during the pandemic, lots of people did. And it was pretty stable at September 30, 2024.”
Ticket income never covered costs at the center, and the gap was filled by donors. Federal appropriations, about $45 million a year, were “really just to fund the maintenance of the memorial, which is the building itself,” said Andrew Taylor, who directs the arts management program at American University.
“Nonprofit performing arts centers do not make positive revenue on earned income. That’s why they’re nonprofits,” Taylor said.
What sets the Kennedy Center apart is the building: “It’s a memorial, and it’s a federal building, but it also behaves like a nonprofit.”
Cash in the bank at the end of the year
$58.9m
$52.9m
$50 million
Extra cash from pandemic relief
and fewer events held
$40.5m
$28.7m
$25.2m
$25m
$21.1m
$20.7m
$17.5m
$12.6m
$9.5m
0
2016
2018
2020
2022
2024
Note: Showing fiscal years ending in late September
Source: Kennedy Center tax audits via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer
How the dam burst
After the takeover, both donors and audiences walked away. Ticket income fell by 15 percent in the financial year that ended in September 2025, and gifts dropped by nearly a quarter. The center expects ticket income to fall by more than two-thirds this year, and gifts in the first four months of 2026 were down about 40 percent on the previous quarter, according to an internal report from June.
Tickets and gifts were “the beating heart of the institution,” Taylor said. “Most of the fuel that made that organization work stopped flowing starting in about February ’25.”
Ticket sales and gifts decline
Credit line drawn
Credit line drawn: 0
April
$15m
June
$21m
Credit line drawn: 0
Gifts, grants
excl. federal
$127m
Tickets,
program income
$105m
98m
89m
64m
28m
Operating deficit
–$1m
2024
–16m
2025
2026
–23m
Note: Showing fiscal years ending in late September, credit line figures are from April 2026 and June 2026
Source: Confidential Kennedy Center board documents, 990 forms via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer (2011-2024) and the Kennedy Center (2025)
He blamed the new leadership’s decisions for the loss of donors and audiences: “The burst happened up the pipe. The water stopped flowing into the organization because of the choices the administration was making.”
Most of the people whose job it was to bring money in have left the center. Richard Grenell, then the center’s president, told the board in March that the development staff had been cut from 94 to 16. The center has also written off $48 million, according to its latest tax filing, and most of it appears related to pledges it no longer expects to collect.
Gahl-Mills said the figures, taken together, were “a sign of something going wrong.” The center was “less stable at September 30, 2025, and it seems that it is in free fall now,” she said. “This is unusual, that this organization has gone this far south, this fast. It’s not the thing we typically see. It is an organization clearly in distress.”
Scraping for cash
The center had long kept a $10 million line of credit that it sometimes dipped into during the year and paid back by year end, according to its audits. In September 2025 it doubled the line to $21 million and has since borrowed against all of it, according to an internal June report.
“It’s really hard to slow down expenses. You have to pay them. In order to pay your payroll, we have to start borrowing,” Taylor said. With the government covering the building but not the shows, “they need to keep borrowing and keep firing people.”
The center has also been draining its debt reserve, which fell from $18 million last September to $13 million in June and was projected to hit $9 million by this week, the end of the fiscal year. About $9 million of the reserve is collateral for the loan on the Reach — the center’s expansion that opened in 2019 — so the money it can actually spend is nearly gone.
It also dipped into the endowment for the Washington National Opera, a pot of donated money that is usually meant to go untouched. Charities generally only use the returns from its investment.
In normal years the Kennedy Center took a payout equal to about 5 percent of its endowment’s value, but by June this year, it had taken $10 million out of a $10.3 million endowment fund, describing it as an extra payout to cover opera bills.
On its part, the center counts the $10 million against the roughly $71 million it says the opera owes it. Conversely, the opera says the center owes it $19 million. The opera has since left, and the two sides are fighting over who owes whom.
By this month, the center “was only able to pay its bills thanks to 17 million dollars raised by President Trump,” the Justice Department told an appeals court on Monday, and that money “is fast being expended.”
The figure appears to refer to the Trump Kennedy Center Foundation, a charity rebranded after the takeover: internal documents put the foundation’s takings at $17.5 million but don’t disclose the donors.
The documents don’t show the fullest possible picture of the center’s finances; that comes from its audited financial reports. The center has not published 2025 audited accounts, which would have usually come by around March. Gahl-Mills said the trustees have a duty to oversee both the audit and the tax filings.
“Where is the board?” Gahl-Mills asked, adding that the center was established as America’s National Cultural Center. “This is a place that belongs to all of us, not a place that belongs to one person.”
The Kennedy Center declined to answer questions about the figures in this article.
Jonathan Edwards contributed to this report.