‘You Should Be Celebrating’: Trump Kennedy Center Rolls Eyes at Union Push

Celebrations, not protests, are in order, Grenell argued. President Trump did not return to Washington, D.C., to shutter the national theater but to save it. “These people who only now want to speak out and organize, were silent while the Center was going into deficit spending,” Grenell told RealClearPolitics of the organization’s operations. “They missed their moment but should be celebrating now.”

The unionization push comes after President Trump fired the old board, named himself chairman, and installed loyalists as trustees earlier this year. Administrative staff, who work in the programming, marketing, and public relations departments, among others, have expressed concern at the rapid changes.

One union organizer who works in the education division told the Washington Post that “communication from leadership to staff has been reduced to emails that are few and far between. We haven’t had any all-staff meetings. Senior staff meetings have been paused. We also have new employees and contractors showing up in our offices without introductions.”

This does not comport with the experience of the new leadership regime, however. A senior staff meeting was held Wednesday, a source with direct knowledge of the situation told RCP. And since accepting the job at the arts institution in February, Grenell has advertised an open-door policy.

Grenell has laid off about 10% of non-federal staff, just 37 employees out of a workforce of nearly 400, according to the Post. The emerging union, which filed paperwork with the National Labor Relations Board to oversee a vote, and which plans to call itself the “Kennedy Center United Arts Workers,” aims to change employment status from “at will,” meaning that they can be let go at any time, to “for cause,” meaning the center would need legal grounds for a firing.

Grenell said that the previous changes in the workforce are a direct result of poor management that left holes on the books and in the building itself. During a visit to the art center earlier this year, Trump complained that Biden had left it in a state of “tremendous disrepair.”

“Over the last few weeks, we cut waste and downsized the staff because the previous leadership created $26 million in fake revenue and had us paying staff salaries from the debt reserves,” Grenell told RCP.

The Kennedy Center operates with an annual budget of about $230 million. When the new arts regime arrived, they discovered an operating deficit of $100 million and a bottom-line deficit of $26 million, according to a source directly familiar with Kennedy Center finances. Complicating the financial picture: a $72 million loan to construct the Kennedy Center’s REACH campus.

A 30-foot-tall Mars balloon escaped from that campus last month and rolled across the highway, creating a headache for D.C. commuters. Another headache, meanwhile, continues for Kennedy Center brass. They say that instead of using extra fundraising dollars to pay off the loan, the previous arts regime used those dollars to plug operating deficits.

“I think the trickery and budget lies we uncovered should be investigated for criminal activity, actually,” Grenell told RCP.

The president will attempt to put the Kennedy Center books back in order himself. ABC News reported last week that Trump will soon headline a fundraiser for the arts center. The sponsorships are pricey. A gold-level sponsorship costs $2 million but includes a performance box, premier seating, and a photo op with Trump.

The current arts drama pales in comparison to the rest of the federal bureaucracy, where the Trump administration has slashed and burned its way through workforces in pursuit of savings. The White House has placed the Kennedy Center off limits for steep cuts.

This is slightly out of character for conservatives who have long called for the public-private institution to pay its own way. The Heritage Foundation, for instance, has recommended that the theater favored by the beltway elite be cut off from taxpayer dollars. Trump, however, has taken the opposite approach. The administration is now leaning on Congress to green-light nearly $250 billion for structural repairs to the theater as well as another nearly $15 million for operating and administrative expenses, RealClearPolitics was first to report.

Reviving the Kennedy Center, a White House official told RCP, is “essential” to his “vision of restoring greatness to our nation’s capital.” And while some productions have pulled out of performances, most notably the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton,” the Kennedy Center itself has yet to cancel a single onstage show. A full lineup of programming is expected to be announced soon.

This has done little to calm the fears of unnerved employees.

“This lack of transparency from leadership has really contributed to a culture of anxiety and uncertainty,” one union organizer, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, told the Post. The primary goal of the union, the worker said, was “greater transparency moving forward.”

The organizer also complained that “experts” have been shut out in favor of a leadership with “very little or no backgrounds in the arts or nonprofit management.” This ostensibly includes Roma Daravi, the new Kennedy Center vice president of communications, who served as White House deputy communications director, despite the fact that she worked as a professional ballerina before politics.

The unionizing arts crowd may have gotten a boost from an unlikely source: the United Automobile Workers. The New York Times reports that the union helped Kennedy Center employees file paperwork with the NRLB. “We’re proud to have their back as they work towards a union election,” a spokesperson for the auto union told the Times.

But a Kennedy Center employee complained that the unionizing effort smacks of “chicken little” theatrics. Patrons of the arts in D.C. are decidedly liberal, and they recently booed Vice President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance at a March concert for the National Symphony Orchestra. A heckler shouted, “You ruined this place!”

Less than two months later, the administration has green-lit hundreds of millions to renovate it. Grenell previously told RCP that the White House was looking past “partisan politics” to restore excellence in the arts, because Trump “believes we deserve to have a national arts center that all Americans can be proud of.”