At the center of President Donald Trump’s partisan takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is a woman named Donna Arduin, its new chief financial officer.
A well known budget analyst, Arduin has been tapped by Republican governors to slash Medicaid spending and other social services in their states. Her recently released review — not a full forensic audit — of the Kennedy Center’s 2025 budget alleges that it ran a $100-million operating deficit and had “$26 million in fictitious revenue,” which Trump’s newly installed CEO, Richard Grenell, called “criminal.” He told the center’s new board that he would “refer this to the U.S. attorney’s office,” according to the conservative Daily Wire.
Grenell is a Trump loyalist who served as deputy director of national intelligence and as ambassador to Germany during Trump’s first term.
After installing Grenell, Trump posted on Truth Social that “At [sic] my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN. I have decided to immediately terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees….We will soon announce a new Board, with an amazing Chairman, DONALD J. TRUMP! Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP.”
Arduin’s History of Controversial Cuts
When Arduin went to work for Alaska’s Governor Mike Dunleavy (R) in 2018, she orchestrated his effort to cut “a whopping $1.6 billion in spending from education, social services, the arts, and nearly every other corner of state government.”
At the time, one of Alaska’s public employee unions calculated that based on Arduin’s recommendations Dunleavy cut the University of Alaska’s budget by over 40%, leaving thousands of students unsure if their promised scholarships would be funded.
The draconian cuts, backed by Charles Koch’s group Americans for Prosperity, led to a drive to recall Dunleavy, though that was ultimately unsuccessful. Arduin stopped advising the governor before a final budget was approved by the legislature.
Since 2005, Arduin has been a partner in Arduin, Laffer and Moore Econometrics, an economic consulting firm she founded with Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore. As Arduin’s mentor, Laffer is often known as the “father of supply-side economics” for his “Laffer Curve,” which purports to prove that tax cuts generate economic growth and therefore bring in more new tax revenue than what is lost from cuts.
In 2012, their firm encouraged Kansas Governor Sam Brownback (R) to sign into law the largest tax cuts in the state’s history, which benefited the wealthiest Kansans by making deep cuts in social services to pay for those tax cuts.
Under the Brownback plan, taxpayers who made less than $25,000 a year had to pay more, while those who made more than $250,000 a year paid less.
Brownback’s supply-side economics experiment proved to be an economic disaster for the state, creating a massive budget deficit and curtailing job growth. A bipartisan supermajority in the Kansas Legislature eventually repudiated the tax cuts in 2017.
Laffer and Moore have also helped write the annual “Rich States, Poor States” report produced by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The report ranks states based on how closely they adhere to the corporate pay-to-play group’s preferred tax and labor policies as opposed to considering actual quality of life factors such as wages, poverty rates, and access to healthcare.
ALEC is the “bill mill” where state legislators and corporate lobbyists write legislation behind closed doors that curtails labor rights, weakens environmental protections, encourages school vouchers, and suppresses voting rights.
During his first term, Trump nominated Moore to serve on the Federal Reserve, but the nomination was withdrawn once his social media posts disparaging women surfaced — including one suggesting that women basketball broadcasters should wear tight skirts.
In California, then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) hired Arduin in 2004 to help prepare the next fiscal year’s budget.
Eager to close a budget shortfall, the governor took Arduin’s advice to propose a budget plan with $274 million in cuts to programs that served the developmentally disabled population. “He dropped the plan amid furious protests,” according to the Los Angeles Times, and again Arduin left California without a new budget in place.
When he took office in January 1999, Florida Governor Jeb Bush (R) hired Arduin as the governor’s budget director, a position she held until 2003. “Arduin was labeled an ‘ogre’ by a legislative leader based on her advocacy for a Florida budget cut that would have eliminated Medicaid payments for adults needing eyeglasses or dental work,” reported the Herald-Tribune.
In 2015, Bruce Rauner, the newly elected governor of Illinois, hired Arduin to devise ways to cut the state’s Medicaid budget. He called her part of his “Turnaround Team.”
“Arduin was hired on a $30,000 per month contract that some criticized as excessive. Rauner, though, defended the cost, saying Arduin is the top budget expert in the country and would save the state billions of dollars,” according to the Illinois State Journal-Register.
The governor chose not to renew her four-month contract, and as in Alaska, California, and Kansas, she left before she helped finalize a new budget.
As for the Kennedy Center’s finances, former CEO Deborah Rutter released a statement claiming that when she left the center three months before Arduin’s review there was a $10-million reserve fund to cover fluctuations in revenue. “I stand by my assertion that at the time of my departure [in February 2025], the Kennedy Center was fiscally sound, on track to balance its budget for the year, and positioned to grow its endowment significantly while serving as a beacon for free artistic expression and a place where everyone could belong.”
With Trump now in charge, the surplus funds available in February have since been offset by plummeting individual show ticket sales, which have declined by 50% since his ascendancy as chairman, along with season subscriptions, which have seen declines of 82% for theater and 57% for dance since the Trump takeover, according to the New York Times.
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