Architectural reviews conducted during the Biden administration documented crumbling infrastructure, obsolete fire alarms, and cancer-linked chemicals inside the Kennedy Center, problems the Trump administration says it inherited and now plans to fix with a two-year closure.

Two maintenance and structural assessments, one from 2021 and another from 2022, paint a picture of a performing arts landmark in serious decline. The reports, produced by architectural experts and now embedded as exhibits in two federal court cases, catalog hazards ranging from rusted electrical equipment that violates code to sealants laced with polychlorinated biphenyl, a chemical linked to cancer. Just the News reviewed the documents and interviewed the Kennedy Center's chief spokeswoman, who placed the blame squarely on the prior administration's neglect.

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts opened in Washington in 1971 to honor the late president. More than five decades later, its internal systems tell a different story than the marble facade. President Trump has moved to close the building for two years and spend roughly a quarter-billion dollars on repairs and renovations, a plan that some groups have challenged in court, with judges in both Florida and Washington intervening to slow the process.

Rusted wiring, leaking vaults, and an obsolete fire alarm

The 2021 PowerPoint presentation reads less like a routine maintenance check and more like an inventory of failures. Electrical feeder insulation was deteriorating. Aluminum feeders were failing the Meggar test, a standard diagnostic for insulation integrity. Distribution equipment, switchboards, panels, and related hardware, was damaged and rusted "in many areas throughout the building." The wiring, the report stated, did not meet the National Electrical Code, the baseline safety standard for electrical installations in the United States.

Water had found its way into critical infrastructure. Inspectors observed active leaks at the east transformer vault rooms and north pump rooms, with staining "most heavily concentrated on the west wall, west ends of beams, and columns of the transformer room." Water pooling near high-voltage electrical equipment is the kind of hazard that would shut down a private building. At the Kennedy Center, it apparently persisted.

The fire alarm system fared no better. One of the reports described it as "obsolete" and in need of full replacement, noting that a design project to address the problem was "currently underway", a status update from 2021 whose present-day resolution remains unclear.

Bathrooms across the building were "not properly ventilated," a problem that sounds mundane until you consider the volume of visitors who pass through a major performing arts venue on any given evening.

Lead paint, PCB sealants, and a roof near the end of its life

The 2022 assessment added a layer of chemical hazard to the structural concerns. Existing caulk and sealants contained polychlorinated biphenyl, commonly known as PCB, a synthetic chemical the EPA has long classified as a probable carcinogen. The steel structure itself was coated with lead paint. Both findings point to materials that predate modern safety standards and that, left in place, pose ongoing exposure risks to workers and visitors alike.

Inspectors examining two terrace roof overhangs found the membrane in "fair to poor condition and near the end of its expected useful lifespan," with "several urgent maintenance repairs" needed on each. A crumbling roof on a building that hosts heads of state, orchestras, and thousands of patrons is not a cosmetic issue. Security footage later captured part of a ceiling crashing to the floor with debris, an incident that vindicated warnings about the building's deteriorating condition and helped prompt Trump's intervention.

The security picture was equally grim. The 2022 assessment found that the building's property and access points had "limited resistance to vehicular and ballistic threats." The video surveillance system was "inconsistent in capabilities and application." Egress doors, the exits people would use in an emergency, were not monitored. For a high-profile cultural institution in the nation's capital, those gaps represent an open invitation to the kind of threat no one wants to imagine.

Staffing shortages left the maintenance office hollowed out

The 2022 report also documented a management vacuum. The Kennedy Center's Project Management Office, the internal team responsible for overseeing building projects, "experienced a turnover and shortage in staffing including the Director position." Without that leadership, the report noted, "it was a challenge to maintain the project output of the PMO without the necessary resources." In plain terms, the office responsible for fixing problems did not have enough people to do the work, and the person who was supposed to run it was gone.

That staffing collapse matters because it helps explain how documented hazards can sit unaddressed for years. Reports get filed. Findings get logged. But if no one is in the chair to authorize and manage the repairs, the binder collects dust while the building collects water damage.

Kennedy Center spokeswoman says Biden team 'did not want to do the work'

Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center's vice president for communications, confirmed to Just the News that the maintenance warnings predated the Trump administration and that the Biden team chose not to act on them. Her assessment was blunt.

"They did not want to do the work that was necessary."

Daravi went further, pointing to how the Biden administration allocated funds. Rather than direct resources toward the aging main building, she said, the administration spent $250 million on a separate complex adjacent to the Kennedy Center.

"Actually, instead, they had $250 million that they used to build a separate complex just next to the main building."

That figure, a quarter-billion dollars, is roughly the same order of magnitude as the Trump administration's planned repair budget. The contrast is stark: one administration built something new next door while the original structure deteriorated; the next administration is proposing to shut down and fix the original. The Trump administration's broader attention to Washington's neglected landmarks has extended beyond the Kennedy Center. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, for instance, recently declared the Reflecting Pool's long-running algae problem solved after deploying new technology, a smaller-scale example of the same impulse to address deferred maintenance that prior administrations let slide.

Daravi's sharpest line captured the broader institutional failure:

"It took a complete overhaul of the institution in order for anyone to care that the building was crumbling."

That sentence carries weight because it does not just indict the Biden administration. It indicts every layer of oversight, board members, congressional appropriators, federal agencies, that received or could have requested these assessments and chose to look the other way.

Courts slow Trump's repair plan as lawsuits mount

Trump's decision to close the Kennedy Center for two years to conduct the overhaul has not gone unchallenged. Some groups, their specific identities are not detailed in the available reporting, filed lawsuits, and courts in both Florida and Washington have intervened to slow the administration's timeline. A federal judge in the case reportedly ordered the Trump administration to explain its closure plans in mid-September 2026.

The legal challenges create an uncomfortable dynamic. The inspection reports, now filed as exhibits in those very court cases, document the hazards that justify the closure. Opponents of the shutdown will have to argue, in effect, that a building with code-violating wiring, leaking transformer rooms, lead paint, PCB-contaminated sealants, and an obsolete fire alarm system should remain open to the public while the litigation plays out.

The Trump administration's willingness to act on inherited problems, even when doing so invites political resistance, mirrors its approach across multiple fronts. From declassifying long-buried government files to confronting institutional rot at federal agencies, the pattern is consistent: surface the problem, name the failure, and move to correct it, regardless of who objects.

Open questions the reports leave behind

Several gaps remain. The reports do not specify who commissioned the architectural reviews or name the firms that conducted them. The identity of the "separate complex" that the Biden administration allegedly built for $250 million is not detailed. Whether the fire alarm replacement project flagged in 2021 as "currently underway" was ever completed is unknown. And the Biden administration's own response to Daravi's characterizations, if one exists, is absent from the record.

The ceiling collapse captured on security footage, which helped trigger Trump's intervention, also lacks specific dating or detailed circumstances in the available documents. What is clear is that the footage showed debris hitting the floor, a visual confirmation of what the inspection reports had been warning about on paper for years.

The broader question of accountability extends to Congress as well. The Kennedy Center receives federal funding. Members of both parties sit on oversight committees with jurisdiction over the building. The 2021 and 2022 reports existed. The staffing shortages were documented. The hazards were cataloged. Whether any member of Congress raised an alarm, or whether the reports simply circulated among bureaucrats who treated them as someone else's problem, remains an open question that deserves an answer.

This is also an administration that has shown it will confront uncomfortable institutional realities head-on, even when the findings are unpleasant and the political cost of acting is real.

When a building's own inspection reports read like a catalog of code violations, chemical hazards, and security failures, and the people responsible for fixing it spent a quarter-billion dollars building something else instead, the problem is not the president who finally ordered the doors closed. The problem is the years of institutional indifference that made closing them necessary.