Whistleblowers say repair work at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts was rushed so contractors could finish cosmetic improvements before events featuring President Trump. The allegation now sits beside a far larger question: how the center handled a $257 million repair package Congress set aside for backlogged work.
Last year, contractors used a cheaper, shorter-lasting primer before repainting the center’s exterior columns, and the result is now estimated to require $1.8 million in repainting because rust is showing through. The same report says the reflecting pool outside the facility will need to be redone after resanding and painting, while a new concert hall floor was installed without accounting for acoustical requirements.
Floca’s two-year warning
In March, Trump named Floca executive director after Floca had served as the Kennedy Center’s facilities director. Earlier this year, a court decision included an excerpt from Floca’s report saying the structural work was substantial enough to warrant closing the facility for two years.
Floca wrote that work on the structural steel and concrete deck defects would render the “primary public access points unusable.” That detail cuts against any effort to describe the repairs as only surface-level touchups, because the underlying report points to a facilitywide disruption if the infrastructure work is done on a full schedule.
$257 million and no-bid work
Congress appropriated $257 million for the Kennedy Center in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, an amount the letter said is six times what the center typically gets in a year. The money was intended to help the center make headway on backlogged repairs and upgrades, with promises to Congress to prudently and efficiently use the funds and to prioritize life-safety, accessibility, and building infrastructure improvement.
The whistleblower report to the Government Accountability Project says the center, under Floca, bypassed the procurement process and used money meant for structural renovations on cosmetic fixes. The letter says the center relied on no-bid contracts in violation of the Federal Acquisition Regulation, and it also says the center was supposed to get a FAR deviation whenever it bypassed those standards.
Sen. Whitehouse’s request
Sen. Whitehouse sent a letter drawing on the whistleblower report and asked Floca to provide the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee a detailed description of how the $257 million is being spent. He also asked how much of the money has gone to life-safety, accessibility, and structural-infrastructure work and how much to cosmetic or aesthetic work.
Whitehouse said, “Center staff were told the White House disliked the beige tile.” He also said the decision to remove the center from FAR has the appearance of a “post hoc” justification for the no-bid contracts.
The Kennedy Center’s board later said it was no longer following the standards, which leaves the most practical question in plain view: how much of the $257 million is actually going to the repairs Congress said it wanted, and how much is being pushed into finishes that can be ripped out and redone.
