Kennedy Center Staff Open Up About a Year of Turmoil

Layoffs, an ever-emptier building, and snarky Signal chats: Employees past and present dish on life at a wounded institution.

Written by Chloe Shoko Rogers | Published on April 17, 2026


Photograph by Evy Mages.

As firings at the Kennedy Center became frequent, staffers began to use the encrypted chat application Signal, building an underground information network out of fear that management was monitoring internal messages on Microsoft Teams There, they shared job leads, pieced together what official channels wouldn’t say, and tracked who had been let go.

Cathleen O’Malley, who produced contemporary music, jazz, and comedy shows at the complex as an artistic-programming manager from March 2024 until February of this year, describes the Signal chats as “snarky, intimate, dismayed, disgusted, sad, mutually supportive, angry, gobsmacked.” Messages were “darkly funny at times,” she says. “Did we have another choice?”

For a while, staff had viewed President Trump’s designs on the center as an absurdity—what could he really do? After all, the arts complex, established as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy, had operated independently for more than 50 years. But Trump had already telegraphed his intentions on Truth Social, saying he wanted to “make the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. GREAT AGAIN,” vowing to purge board members who didn’t share his “Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture,” and singling out a series of drag shows that he insisted were “targeting our youth.”

Trump had reason to fixate on the center. During his first term, television producer Norman Lear announced he would skip a White House reception tied to his Kennedy Center Honor in 2017, followed by another recipient pulling out after Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” following the death of a protester at a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville. Trump canceled the reception and shunned the awards ceremony—and the center—for the rest of his term.

{snip}