President Trump is cleaning house at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Upset over some of the center’s performances and possibly miffed over the fact that three honorees in 2017 didn’t want to meet with him, Trump fired Biden-appointed board members and others, criticized the center’s programming, and, amazingly, has appointed himself as the new chairman of the center. There is now speculation that Trump will orient the Kennedy Center toward country-music performances.
The controversy demonstrates how different conservatives are from libertarians. While conservatives are hailing Trump for taking over the Kennedy Center and moving it in an appropriate — i.e., right-wing — direction, libertarians ask a fundamental question: What business does the federal government have in the arts? Our answer: No business at all, not even with Trump or some other right-winger in charge.
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While the Kennedy Center is not a governmental entity, it operates as a government-private partnership. While its programing is sustained by private funds, it receives annual funding from the federal government for building maintenance and operation. That annual amount ranges from $40 million to $50 million. Yes, you read that right — $40-$50 million of U.S. taxpayer money every year to cover the maintenance and operation of the building.
Rather than take over the Kennedy Center, Trump could have simply decreed that he was terminating all federal support to the center and severing all ties of the federal government to the center. That would have left it an entirely privately supported entity, which is what it should be. It also would have saved taxpayers some $40-$50 million per year. Instead, succumbing to his inner urge to control, Trump decided to engineer a takeover of the center, one that now entails the president of the United States being overall in charge of running the Kennedy Center.
Perhaps it’s worth pointing out that the idea of a Kennedy Center actually stretches back to President Franklin Roosevelt’s socialist New Deal program in the 1930s, when it was proposed to establish a Cabinet level Department of Science, Art, and Literature. Never mind that the Constitution didn’t delegate such a power to the federal government. The “emergency” of the Great Depression was being used to exercise all sorts of unconstitutional powers, something that Trump can clearly relate to given his declaration of “emergencies” as an excuse for exercising dictatorial-like powers.
While a federal department of the arts was never established, many years later a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, signed into law the National Cultural Center Act, which, according to Wikipedia, was “the first time that the federal government helped finance a structure dedicated to the performing arts.” By 1959, estimated costs had escalated from $10-$25 million to $60 million. In 1964, the National Cultural Center was renamed after Kennedy, who had been assassinated the previous year.
The moral question is: Why should anyone be forced, through taxation, to fund the Kennedy Center? After all, I’m willing to bet that there are lots of Americans who live far away from Washington, D.C. who have never been to the Kennedy Center and don’t plan to do so. Where is the morality in forcing them to underwrite the cultural interests of people who live in or near Washington, D.C. who attend performances at the center?
Where is Elon Musk and his DOGE team when you need them? They ought to be telling Trump to resign his chairmanship of the Kennedy Center, terminate all funding to the center, and end the federal government’s partnership with the center. Not only would this save millions of dollars in taxpayer money, it would send a message that the federal government has no more business in the arts than it does in religion.
