For those of you with your heads up your asses, that's bullshit. The facility was using building maintenance money to shore up its finances since the 1970s. The building state has been widely known and reported on that entire period. Until Trump rubbed our noses in it, it's been ignored by the board. This isn't a secret. The media had an entirely different voice on the matter until Trump. Then Trump hatred overcame everything else. Here's the actual history: "The Kennedy Center’s deferred-maintenance backlog did not begin as a deliberate short-term accounting tactic in one specific year. It accumulated from the building’s opening in 1971 because of unclear responsibility and limited funding, then became a documented, recurring issue that later leaderships managed rather than fully eliminated. From 1971 through the early 1990sThe National Park Service and the Kennedy Center shared operations-and-maintenance duties under a cooperative agreement that never assigned clear responsibility for long-term capital work. Periodic one-off congressional appropriations were the only source of major repairs. By 1990, both parties acknowledged “severe deterioration” and a large backlog of deferred cyclical maintenance; congressional testimony that year cited an immediate $30.5 million need. In 1994 Congress transferred sole capital-project authority to the Kennedy Center and required an annually updated Comprehensive Building Plan. The first CBP appeared in 1995 and explicitly aimed to clear the existing backlog in two stages (critical life-safety and accessibility work 1995–1999, then remaining deferred capital repairs 2000–2009). Federal appropriations for those projects totaled more than $200 million between 1995 and 2005. Subsequent CBP updates (2002, 2007, 2011, 2015, 2021) continued to list hundreds of millions of dollars in remaining or newly identified work. Systems installed in the mid-1990s (chillers, boilers, etc.) themselves reached end-of-life, water-intrusion problems persisted, and the privately funded $250 million REACH expansion (opened 2019) added square footage whose ongoing federal operations-and-maintenance costs were not fully analyzed for life-cycle impact. GAO reviews in 2004, 2005, and 2021 repeatedly noted incomplete planning, project delays, and an un-eliminated backlog. In short, the pattern of postponing maintenance while relying on federal capital appropriations and prioritizing new construction or programming began in the 1970s, was formally recognized and planned against in 1995, and never fully disappeared. Current leadership describes the resulting $250 million-plus backlog as “decades of deferred maintenance” left by prior administrations." Trump is a jerk. He pisses people off for no reason. However, the KC used moneys meant to keep the building functional to shore up its bottom line. Pre-Trump, even outlets like Wapo and the New York Times freely reported on the problem. Now, they're pretending it just showed up because Trump. It's moronic. Unlike you, I've watched this unfold in real time for my whole adult life. I was born in Arlington. I've been to the center dozens of times. I've even performed their. I'm a licensed professional engineer with more than four decades of experience and I've observed the decay personally. Unlike you, I know what I'm talking about. The building is in trouble, and that did NOT start with Trump. It goes back many decades.