institution

WASHINGTON — The curtain started to come down for President Trump at the Kennedy Center on Saturday.

After a day of legal maneuvers and thunderstorms, workers began the process in the early morning hours of removing the letters spelling out Trump’s name from the facade of the performing arts venue. They were a few hours past a court-ordered deadline and did their work shrouded by a tarp, much to the frustration of onlookers who had gathered for hours hoping to witness a dramatic moment symbolizing the limits of Trump’s power.

As the sun rose over Washington, the tarp remained in place, leaving it impossible to determine whether all the letters had been removed. Shortly after midnight, the Kennedy Center asked a judge to extend the deadline until noon Eastern time, citing the storms for delaying the work. The court agreed to that request Saturday morning.

The removal of Trump’s name closes one of the more unusual chapters in the history of the Kennedy Center, which began construction in 1964 and was dedicated to the memory of the slain president, John F. Kennedy. At what is typically one of the few relatively nonpartisan spaces in Washington, Trump has exerted unprecedented executive influence over the congressionally created venue during his second term.

Though he rarely discussed the Kennedy Center during his 2024 campaign, Trump moved quickly to oust the institution’s leadership when he returned to office in January 2025 and replaced it with a board of trustees that named him chairman. It rebranded the venue the “Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts” and his name was quickly added to the building’s exterior, though an official name change would require an act of Congress.

While the removal of his name marks a setback for Trump, he is moving forward with other plans to reshape the physical landscape of the nation’s capital in ways that have few modern parallels.

He demolished the East Wing of the White House and is building a controversial ballroom in its place. He remodeled the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and plans extensive renovations of a golf course in East Potomac Park, moves that could significantly reduce the public’s access to running and biking paths. He is also moving forward with a triumphal arch that would sit near Arlington National Cemetery across the Potomac River in Virginia.

Indeed, as Trump’s name is being removed from the Kennedy Center, the South Lawn of the White House has been transformed into a venue for a UFC match intended to celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence but also coinciding with Trump’s birthday on Sunday.

Back at the Kennedy Center, there are many questions about the institution’s future. The same May court decision that ordered Trump’s name to be removed from the building also blocked a planned two-year closure for renovations that was set to begin next month.

The Kennedy Center’s calendar for the weeks ahead include performances of “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” and “Bluey’s Big Play.” Comedian Bill Maher is to be awarded the Mark Twain Award for American Humor during a ceremony on June 28.

But little is scheduled for the stages beyond that and, after the Kennedy Center substantially reduced staff, it is unclear how quickly it could build out a robust performance list. Trump, angered by the court’s order to remove his name, has said he would turn the Kennedy Center over to Congress and has suggested it might simply shutter because of public safety concerns.

In its unsuccessful appeal Friday seeking a pause on the order removing Trump’s name, the Kennedy Center’s leadership argued, in terms similar to the president’s use of language and framing of the argument, that the lower court was interfering with needed renovations.

“The District Court is not allowing us to close in order to properly fix up and repair the Building, including potentially life threatening structural damage like beams and parking garage ceilings that are rusted, and in serious danger of falling onto people below,” according to the appeal. “Indeed, total collapse!”

The institution also suggested that the president’s name could return to the building if the Kennedy Center later wins its appeal.

If the court denied the venue’s request for a pause, the Kennedy Center argued that it would “be forced to squander time and money — by both removing the signage and then potentially returning it after appeal.”

Sloan writes for the Associated Press.

The Washington National Opera filed a lawsuit on Thursday that demands more than $17 million from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The opera company claims it is owed millions in donations that have been withheld.

The lawsuit claims that after the opera company and the Kennedy Center parted ways in January, center officials have not returned more than $17 million in gifts and donations that belong to the opera company. The lawsuit lists the federal government as a defendant because the Kennedy Center was established by Congress.

According to the suit, the opera company and the Kennedy Center had a longstanding contract in which WNO produced its operas at the Kennedy Center, which in return, provided a number of services and other support for the opera company including managing its donations.

In late 2025, after approximately 15 years of affiliation, the suit claims that the Kennedy Center stopped performing the obligations of their agreement, which included marketing, fundraising and administrative support, as well as timely reporting on the growth of the opera company’s funds. When the opera company requested the Kennedy Center remedy the issue, center officials asked to sever ties.

“Five months have now passed since the termination of the affiliation, and the Kennedy Center still has not returned the funds to WNO,” reads the suit. “To the contrary, according to the Kennedy Center’s Chief Financial Officer, the Kennedy Center has put a significant portion of WNO’s money at risk by using it to collateralize the Kennedy Center’s line of credit.”

In an emailed statement responding to the lawsuit, Roma Daravi, a spokeswoman for the Kennedy Center, told The Times that the contract between the opera house and the center financially burdened the center for more than a decade. The statement claimed that taking into account the company’s endowment, an external accounting firm calculated that the opera company had “accumulated a $72 million deficit to the center” between 2011 and 2026.

“The Center has acted transparently and in the best interests of the public throughout this process,” the statement reads. “This lawsuit is meritless, and we plan to pursue a countersuit to defend the institution.”

The legal action comes during a tumultuous time for the Kennedy Center. Last year, President Trump fired the board and appointed himself chairman of the Kennedy Center.

In December, President Trump’s name was installed on the exterior of the center the day after his handpicked board of trustees voted to change the institution’s name to the “Trump-Kennedy Center.” Last month, a federal judge ordered President Trump’s name to be removed from the exterior of the building within two weeks and a halt to the Trump administration’s planned two-year closure of the venue.

On Friday, the court-ordered deadline for removing his name sparked widespread interest and crowds gathered outside the center. A live cam was also placed near the structure.

The Times arts editor Jessica Gelt contributed to this report.

Weeks after Trump administration officials announced that management of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory would open to competitive bidding for the first time, questions remain as to why Caltech could lose control of the lab its researchers founded in 1936.

On one hand, observers note, high-profile delays and cost overruns on significant recent JPL projects earned sharp criticism from NASA even before the 2024 presidential election.

On the other, the second Trump administration’s record of squeezing scientific funding and attacking institutions in Democratic-led states make it difficult to consider any action as separate from the charged political atmosphere, analysts say.

“My first instinct is that this [competition] isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s not written in stone that Caltech must run JPL, and it wouldn’t be the worst thing to have some competition for running the place,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy at the nonprofit Planetary Society.

“That said, that requires this contract evaluation to be fair and unbiased, and this administration has no credibility in such things,” he added. “The responsibility is on NASA to earn the trust and ensure such an evaluation is open and free from political meddling. That’s almost impossible.”

JPL became part of NASA when the space agency was formed in 1958, and Caltech has been awarded the contract to run the institution outright ever since.

Its current 10-year contract with NASA, which is valued at up to $30 billion, runs through Sept. 30, 2028.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced the competition on May 22 as part of a slate of sweeping organizational changes at the space agency.

“When you step back, it is worth considering how many additional missions we could have undertaken with the resources lost to program cancellations and cost overruns over the years,” Isaacman wrote in a memo to staff. “That is the problem we must fix, so the American taxpayer and space-loving community can receive the highest scientific return on every dollar we spend at NASA.”

Allowing competition on the contract for JPL, the lone Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) in NASA’s portfolio, was an effort to address cost-efficiency concerns, Isaacman wrote.

“This process will take several years, and I do not anticipate it having any impact on the projects underway or the location of the facilities,” he wrote. “It does, however, provide an opportunity to evaluate management costs, overhead burdens, and ideally find ways to get after the science faster and more affordably.”

In a joint statement, Caltech President Thomas F. Rosenbaum and JPL Director Dave Gallagher said that the competition was “no surprise” and that a team was already in place “to ensure we are positioned for success.”

In July, NASA’s Office of Procurement held an informational event for companies and institutions interested in the upcoming FFRDC contract.

The dozens of registered attendees included universities such as USC, Texas A&M and Georgia Tech; aerospace companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin; and nonprofit corporations like MITRE, which manages several FFRDCs, and Universities Space Research Assn., a university consortium founded by the National Academy of Sciences in 1969. (SpaceX, which has been awarded more than $13 billion in NASA contracts in the last decade, was not on the list.)

“Lockheed Martin has more than 50 years of deep space exploration success with JPL, supporting landmark missions to Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Pluto, including nearly a dozen missions to Mars,” said Bob Behnken, vice president of exploration and technology strategy. “We look forward to building on that unmatched partnership in the years ahead. We are closely following NASA’s review and will continue to assess how we can best contribute to the agency’s mission.”

Other attendees contacted by The Times declined to discuss their involvement.

Isaacman indicated that JPL could come under scrutiny even before he took over NASA. The billionaire entrepreneur referenced high costs at the La Cañada Flintridge institution in a memo prepared in advance of his confirmation hearings on his priorities for the space agency.

“Contract structure: Very expensive,” Isaacman wrote of JPL in a table outlining organizational issues at each of NASA’s centers. “Must increase the output and ‘time-to-science’ KPI,” or key performance indicator.

The institution has recently suffered a number of high-profile management stumbles.

After the JPL-managed Psyche mission to a metal-rich asteroid failed to meet its 2022 launch date, NASA commissioned an independent review that said internal reorganizations and personnel changes created distracted and uninformed managers and burned-out, stretched-thin staffers.

After a 2023 independent review found there was “near zero probability” of the JPL-managed Mars Sample Return mission making its proposed 2028 launch date, and “no credible” way to bring rocks back from the Red Planet within the stated budget, Isaacman’s predecessor, Bill Nelson, put out a call for proposals to industry and all other NASA centers, forcing JPL to compete for its own project.

After Trump’s election, Nelson announced that the final decision would be in the next administration’s hands.

The White House pushed for massive cuts to NASA’s 2026 budget that Congress overturned, and has lobbied for similarly steep cuts again this year. JPL has instituted painful cost-cutting measures of its own, reducing staffing from roughly 6,500 employees in 2023 to 4,500 last year through layoffs and attrition.

Its struggles come at a point when NASA is enthusiastically embracing private industry. Last month the agency awarded several key contracts for its upcoming lunar missions to Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and other private companies.

Trump has also made no secret of his willingness to punish states that haven’t voted for him through job losses. In announcing his decision to move U.S. Space Command from Colorado to Alabama, Trump acknowledged that his loss in Colorado in three presidential elections played a part in the move.

It’s impossible to consider any decision on JPL’s future as separate from the administration’s track record of politically motivated decisions, Dreier said.

“At the heart of this is why? Why now? If this is not just some rank political attack on California, what do they hope to gain from this?” he said. “That deserves explanation, because the administration otherwise has no credibility here.”

The U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation Monday into Smith College, an all-women’s institution in Massachusetts, for admitting transgender women.

The probe by the department’s Office of Civil Rights will look at whether the college violated Title IX, a 1972 law forbidding discrimination based on sex in education.

The move is the latest by the Trump administration — whose rhetoric has frequently included attacks on trans people — to limit transgender rights in the U.S. The administration has said that Title IX prevents trans women from participating in women’s sports, suing several states and launching investigations into schools for not complying.

Smith College, a private liberal arts school founded in 1871, has admitted trans women since 2015, along with many other elite women’s colleges.

The school’s admission policies drew attention and sparked on-campus activism in 2013, when a trans high school senior was denied acceptance because her gender identity did not match the one on her financial aid forms.

Its website now says that “any applicants who self-identify as women; cis, trans, and nonbinary women” are eligible to apply to the school. Advocates have supported the shift over the years, saying that women’s colleges were founded to educate those marginalized because of their gender.

The number of women’s colleges in the U.S. has declined from more than 200 to just 30 as of fall of 2023, according to the Women’s College Coalition.

A college spokesperson did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

According to the Department of Education in a news release, Title IX contains an exception that allows colleges to be all-male or all-female, but it only applies “on the basis of biological sex difference, not subjective gender identity.”

The investigation into Smith College stems from a complaint filed with the Office of Civil Rights in June 2025 by the conservative legal group Defending Education.

“DE and its members oppose, among other things, discrimination on the basis of sex in America’s K-12 schools and institutions of higher education,” the organization said in a news release.

During the Biden administration, new Title IX regulations were issued to prevent discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. However, those were struck down by a federal judge in January 2025 who decided the rules had legal shortcomings.

Ding writes for the Associated Press.