President Donald Trump took control of the Kennedy Center 19 months ago. Since then, the center has used up nearly every financial cushion it had, and one arts management expert says it now appears to be “in free fall.”
The Washington Post reviewed confidential board documents and tax filings that show the center’s Trump-appointed leadership has borrowed the full amount of its bank credit line and taken money from an endowment that donors meant to stay untouched. The center has also written off tens of millions of dollars in pledges from supporters who stopped paying.
The Justice Department described the situation in a filing with an appeals court on Monday, saying the center “was only able to pay its bills thanks to 17 million dollars raised by President Trump” and warned that the money “is fast being expended.” Internal documents link the figure to the Trump Kennedy Center Foundation, a rebranded charity that has raised $17.5 million from donors it has not named.
Trump has said the center was “losing hundreds of millions of dollars” when he took over, but experts told the Post that the previous leadership left the center in better financial shape than it was in most years before the pandemic.
“This was a pretty stable — large, complicated, but stable — organization,” said Karen Gahl-Mills, who directs Indiana University’s arts administration program.
That changed quickly. In the fiscal year that ended in September 2025, ticket revenue fell 15 percent and donations fell nearly a quarter. This year, the center expects ticket income to drop by more than two-thirds, and gifts in early 2026 were down about 40 percent from the quarter before.
Richard Grenell, then the center’s president, told the board in March that the fundraising staff had been cut from 94 to 16. The center has also written off $48 million, most of it pledges it no longer expects to collect.
To stay afloat, the center doubled its credit line to $21 million last September and has since borrowed all of it. Its debt reserve fell from $18 million and was projected to reach $9 million by the end of the fiscal year on Wednesday. About $9 million of the reserve is collateral for the loan on the Reach expansion, so the center has almost nothing left that it can actually spend.
The center also took $10 million out of the Washington National Opera’s $10.3 million endowment. In past years it took out about 5 percent annually. The opera has since cut ties with the center, and the two sides are fighting over which one owes the other money.
Gahl-Mills told the Post the figures were clearly “a sign of something going wrong.”
The Kennedy Center was “less stable at Sept. 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.”
The center also has not released its audited financial statements for 2025, which usually come out by March. Gahl-Mills questioned whether the trustees are doing their job of oversight. “Where is the board?” she asked.
The Kennedy Center declined to answer the Post’s questions.
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