U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW) has expanded his investigation into the mismanagement of the Kennedy Center.

The senator sent a new letter to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to investigate the Kennedy Center leadership’s potential mismanagement of federal funding and disregard of federal contracting standards in an attempt to please the personal tastes of the Center’s Chairman President Donald Trump.  The new letter comes after Senator Whitehouse opened an investigation into mismanagement at the Center that began in November 2025.

In the new letter, Whitehouse said, “I write regarding allegations that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (the ‘Center’) has mismanaged federally appropriated funds to the detriment of the building.  Specifically, we have received allegations that the Kennedy Center has conducted rushed renovation and maintenance work with disregard to its commitments to Congress and the federal contracting standards the Center has long applied to its own procurements. . . . Public funds ought to be spent lawfully, prudently, and in service of the institution, not on the stylistic whims of the current President.”

According to the ranking member, he received disclosure from the Government Accountability Project that raises serious questions about the Center’s leadership and the Board’s financial management of the Kennedy Center and whether the Center’s representations to Congress were made in good faith.

According to the whistleblower’s disclosure, a cosmetic and rushed revamp of the Center’s Reflecting Pool is already rusting and peeling, and will need to be fully rebuilt; President Trump’s preferred contractor cut corners when repainting the Center’s columns, sticking taxpayers with the repair bill; an $8 million no-bid flooring contract went to a firm with no apparent concert-hall experience; the Kennedy Center tore out a brand-new bathroom floor because President Trump didn’t like the color; Kennedy Center management set aside contracting rules to hit the President’s deadline to receive the new “FIFA Peace Prize,” telling staff “we’ll deal with the lawsuits later”; and The Kennedy Center rewrote its own contracting rules in a post hoc effort to justify the no-bid contracts awarded to facilitate the rushed renovations.

In the letter, Senator Whitehouse requested documents and answers to a series of questions from Executive Director Matt Floca by July 23, 2026, and reiterated his demand for substantive responses to questions and document requests raised in the initial investigation letter, which have gone unanswered.

The text of the Ranking Member’s letter is available here.  A PDF of the appendix containing the whistleblower declaration and supporting documents is available here.