The Kennedy Center’s Tax Return

For 19 months, Donald Trump has portrayed himself as the Kennedy Center’s savior.

He promised to root out “woke” programming at the arts complex.

He claimed that past leaders had neglected dangerous conditions in the building—a structure that he now says might have to be “ripped down” if he can’t put his name on it.

Throughout his tenure, he and his allies have accused former executives of financial mismanagement and even “fraud” that left the organization struggling.

Now there’s a fuller picture of the finances Trump inherited—and of what happened during his first months in charge.

A previously unseen federal tax filing captures an institution in transition: It spans the final months of its previous leadership and roughly seven months under Trump, offering a baseline for understanding a financial crisis that has grown more severe over the year that has followed. (The Kennedy Center provided me with the filing because nonprofits are required to do so within 30 days of a request.) On paper, the Kennedy Center had an extraordinary financial year.

It reported more than $516 million in total revenue on its 990 form for the fiscal year that began in October 2024 and ended last September—a nearly $210 million increase from the previous year.

But that windfall appears to have been largely driven by a summer infusion of federal renovation money, which Trump had asked Congress to include in its One Big Beautiful Bill Act and is now threatening to withhold .

If you subtract the $257 million in renovation funds from the revenue, the Kennedy Center appears to have spent nearly $47 million more than it took in that fiscal year, a precipitous drop compared with the funds reported on its previous 990.

Notably, the new filing includes a $48 million “bad debt expense,” which is essentially a write-down of previously recorded revenue that an organization no longer expects to collect.

In the fiscal year ending in 2024, when the center was led by President Deborah Rutter and a bipartisan board of trustees, it brought in about $40 million more than it spent. (The Kennedy Center and the White House did not immediately respond to questions about the return.) Stripping out the renovation money does not necessarily mean the Kennedy Center ran a $47 million deficit last fiscal year.

Two experts I spoke with cautioned that the tax return does not provide enough information to make that calculation cleanly.

One of them, Michael Kaiser, an arts-management consultant and a former Kennedy Center president, told me that 990s combine operating revenue and expenses with capital funding and other sources of income, making it difficult to isolate the institution’s underlying financial performance from top-line figures.

“It combines everything into one mush,” he said.