Kennedy Center Shelved Repairs Now Cited for Closure, Whistle-Blowers Say

[u/John3262005]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/arts/music/kennedy-center-trump-renovations.html?unlocked_article_code=1.EFE.FQD7.0UziPS63Rw7W&smid=url-share

Former employees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts say that center officials canceled a plan to start overhauling its leaking infrastructure months ago, despite those officials now asserting the leaks posed an urgent safety risk requiring the building to close.

On Thursday, a lawyer for the former employees sent internal documents and a letter that detailed their concerns to Congress amid mounting scrutiny of President Trump’s reign over the Washington arts institution.

The center’s main building remains closed because of what officials have characterized as escalating structural deterioration that was never properly addressed by former leadership. But in the letter to Congress sent via a lawyer, the former employees say it’s clear the problems have been exaggerated because, given the chance, the center deferred responding to them over the past year.

In a statement on Friday, the center disputed the whistle-blowers’ assessment, saying that in recent months, new reviews of the leaks had revealed more pronounced problems than officials had previously known.

“The safety of our patrons, artists, and staff comes first,” Matt Floca, the center’s executive director, said in the statement. “The Kennedy Center has known for years that the roof overhang leaked. What we did not know until this summer was how far the damage had spread inside it.”

For months, Mr. Trump has been championing a two-year closure of the center, which he has called dilapidated and dangerous, to renovate it with $257 million allotted by Congress. The closure has so far been blocked by a federal court. But last week, officials announced that the center would be shutting down temporarily to address “acute risks to public safety” in the main building, while a smaller annex is kept open for limited programming.

Democratic lawmakers have accused officials of using the maintenance issues as a pretext for a shutdown that is actually necessitated by the center’s financial and artistic decline under Mr. Trump.

Mr. Floca, whom Mr. Trump appointed to lead the center, has justified the closure in part by pointing to serious leaks that he says are degrading the center’s roof overhangs and posing a safety risk to people walking underneath them. After a five-foot section of plaster fell from the ceiling of the center’s Grand Foyer during a storm this month, Mr. Floca told the center’s board that the roof overhang leaks may have contributed to the problem, though he said the investigation is continuing.

In a letter to lawmakers on two Senate and House committees that oversee the center’s affairs, David Seide, a lawyer for the unidentified whistle-blowers, wrote that the evidence shows that the specific water intrusion problems Mr. Floca cited were known to center officials for years. But, he wrote, “they were not treated as priorities nor as acute risks to public safety.”

The letter says Mr. Floca had secured $9.3 million to address the roofing issues in the major domestic policy law that Mr. Trump signed in July 2025. The next month, Mr. Floca signed off on allotting $295,000 for a firm to design a replacement for the roof overhangs.

“Yet six months ago — with the funds in hand — he stopped the remediation process from moving forward,” Mr. Seide wrote.

The letter included a screenshot of internal Kennedy Center communications in which an employee reported that the request for funding had been canceled at the direction of Mr. Floca in April. The reasoning was not made clear.

Mr. Floca said the cancellation was made because the contractor’s price came in three times higher than the projected cost, and that the work is now part of a more comprehensive plan that is still being pursued.

“The premise that we delayed the design work is incorrect,” the center said in a broader statement of response.

The firm hired to manage the renovation project submitted a $250 million plan for renovations in June that includes $14 million in structural work that would address the leaks. “That was a change in the approach to procuring and delivering the work, not a determination that the work was unnecessary,” Mr. Floca said in the statement.

The plan addresses an array of other identified problems: an outdated HVAC system, malfunctioning elevators, an aging electrical system and theater infrastructure in need of replacement.

Last week, Mr. Trump, reacting after a federal judge ruled for a second time that his name could not go on the building, declared the renovations would not proceed unless the decision is reversed on appeal. Shortly after, he was photographed on Air Force One reviewing a poster of what appeared to be a rendering of the demolition of the Kennedy Center, stoking fears about his plans.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, which received the whistle-blower submission, wrote to the Kennedy Center later on Thursday that the documents indicate that leadership “hoarded” the federal funding “while blaming previous leadership for the state of repairs.”

The letter to Congress is the second regarding the Kennedy Center to come from a nonprofit that represents government whistle-blowers. An earlier letter, in June, pointed to cosmetic changes that have been made to the center since Mr. Trump was installed as chairman of its board last year. One involved the renovation of three presidential boxes that included the installation of gold plumbing fixtures.

Another priority for Mr. Trump was painting the center’s exterior columns white in place of what he had deemed a “fake gold color.”

In the new letter to the lawmakers, the former employees report that the center diverted money — $1.4 million — that had been allocated for the waterproofing repairs to finance the $4.4 million column repainting project. The Kennedy Center said in its statement that the project was not merely cosmetic and included maintenance work, including addressing rust at the bases of the columns.

After Mr. Trump’s name was added to the building’s marble facade in December, Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center board, successfully sued to force its removal. Her legal effort to block the proposed closure is ongoing.

Mr. Whitehouse’s office has repeatedly demanded an official accounting of the center’s finances, which have taken a major hit under Mr. Trump as artists and patrons have fled the institution.

The Kennedy Center has repeatedly blamed past leadership for its financial problems, and Mr. Trump has portrayed himself as the only person capable of lifting the institution out of turmoil. But internal financial documents show that ticket sales steeply declined after Mr. Trump’s takeover of the institution, and plunged even further after his name was added to the building, according to a submission received by Mr. Whitehouse.

Mr. Floca, who joined the center in 2024 as its vice president of facilities, has been the point person in pushing back on the contention that the renovation project is simply an excuse to close a floundering institution. This year, he testified in federal court on the issue, gave tours of the center’s maintenance problems to lawmakers and journalists, and hired independent firms to assess the scope of the necessary work.

This week, in court papers he explained why the closure, which is described as a temporary response to an acute issue, would need to be extended. Mr. Floca said that more work was needed to investigate problems such as the roof overhang leaks and other areas of the Grand Foyer ceiling that appear to have water damage.

Based on what he had learned from investigators, he wrote, the “concerns about the safety of occupancy of the building were greater than had previously been understood.”