Updated April 23, 2026 at 7:57 AM PDT
The Kennedy Center gave reporters a behind-the-scenes tour of its facilities on Wednesday. President Trump has said the performing arts center is in dire need of repair and that it needs to close for two years to complete the work. The tour was intended to justify the closure. Members of congress or their staff took a similar tour last week.
Matt Floca, who recently replaced Richard Grenell as the Kennedy Center's executive director, led reporters into the bowels of the immense marble and steel structure on Potomac River. He showed the impact of water damage on the Center's underbelly, including corroded steel beams in the service tunnel, concrete degradation in the parking lot and rust on the marble facade. There was also electrical equipment that Floca said dated to the 1990s.
Floca, who first joined the Kennedy Center two years ago as its Vice President of Facilities, told reporters he tried to come up with a plan where the Center stayed open as numerous repair projects took place.
"We were working to put all of the different pieces together, but again, it was infeasible, because you can never really truly predict all of the different productions that were going to happen, and you can't predict all of the things that you're going to find when you get into a construction project," he said. "So the recommendation was just natural: you shut the building down, temporarily, and you make this investment, and then you reopen."
There has been considerable pushback to just about everything President Trump has done at the Kennedy Center. Greg Werkheiser, co-founder of Cultural Heritage Partners, doesn't believe closing the Center is necessary.
"If this were truly about maintenance, there is no need to shut the building down for two years. The Kennedy Center has always done major systems work during the day, while performances continue at night," he said.
Cultural Heritage Partners and a coalition of architecture and historic preservation groups has filed a lawsuit to require the Trump administration to fully disclose plans for the Kennedy Center and to secure authorization for them from Congress. Werkheiser points to other ways Trump is trying to change the look of Washington, D.C., without going through the proper approval process.
"The concern here is that we end up in another situation like happened with the east wing of the White House, where the president made assurances to the American public that it would not be harmed on one day and the next day it was destroyed," said Werkheiser. "We can't see anything like that happen again and certainly not with the Kennedy Center."
Democrats have objected to a number of Trump's changes to the Kennedy Center. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse launched an investigation into what he called "cronyism and corruption" at the Center. In a letter obtained by NPR, Whitehouse wrote to Floca that he thinks mismanagement is actually the reason for the closure. "What seems to have happened is that the Trump Administration's hand-picked leadership team and Board ran the Kennedy Center into the ground with terrible decisions while looting the place for private benefit," Whitehouse wrote, "Then, to explain the crashed institution's inability to meet expenses and payroll, you had to close it for 'renovations.'"
Everyone seems to agree that the Kennedy Center needs repairs, including its former president Deborah Rutter. She told NPR, "If they can do the complicated work of seat replacement and HVAC and the water pump, fantastic. I hope they can do that, and I hope they can do it effectively so that those issues don't rise up again."
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