The Board the President Appoints

The Kennedy Center told a federal court this week that it cannot meet payroll within weeks and may have to close. Whatever happens next, the episode is a lesson in how the institution is built, and the building is stranger than most people assume.

It is two things at once. It is a national memorial to a president, and it is a performing arts centre that sells tickets.

The Park Service's listing reflects the first half. The building is a federal structure, and the federal government pays to maintain it.

The provision on the building is where that duty sits in law. Congress appropriates money for the structure itself: maintenance, repair and security of a national memorial.

What Congress does not fund is the art. Productions, orchestras, staff and the rest of the operating budget come from tickets and from donors, like any other arts organisation.

That split is the first thing to understand about this week's warning. A collapse in ticket sales and philanthropy is not cured by the appropriation, because the appropriation was never for that.

The statute creating the board explains the second half, and it is the part that makes the institution unusual among cultural organisations.

The board of trustees includes a set of officials who serve because of the jobs they hold, among them members of Congress and senior executive officers. The rest, the general trustees who make up the large majority, are appointed by the president for terms of years.

Most large arts institutions are governed by boards that recruit themselves. Trustees are chosen by existing trustees, usually for what they can raise, and the chief executive answers to that group.

Here the appointing power sits with a political office, and appointments continue as terms expire. A president who serves long enough shapes the whole board by ordinary operation of the statute.

The centre's own account of its trustees sets out the current membership.

None of this was designed as a problem. A national memorial needs some public accountability for who governs it, and appointment by an elected president is a defensible way to provide that.

The difficulty appears when the board's composition becomes the subject of the institution's own crisis, because the structure offers no second centre of gravity.

A self-perpetuating board that mismanages an institution can be replaced by donors withholding money until it changes. That is slow and unpleasant, but it is a lever.

A board appointed by a president is insulated from that pressure. Donors can withhold money, and the same trustees remain in place, because their seats do not depend on donations.

The reverse is also true: the trustees cannot be removed by anyone the donors can reach. The only offices that can change the board's composition are the one that appoints it and the one that writes the statute.

Which brings the question back to Congress, and to the difference between the two funding streams.

Congress can appropriate emergency money for the building without touching the programming, because the two have always been separate lines. It can also attach conditions, as it does elsewhere, and those conditions are the only practical way the legislature influences how the centre is run.

An institution that is politically appointed and commercially funded depends on those two facts not pulling against each other. When the appointments become contested and the ticket-buyers and donors react to that contest, the commercial half fails while the political half stays exactly as it was.

That is the structural story underneath a specific week of bad news, and it does not depend on which president made the appointments.

The design assumes that the people appointed will be uncontroversial enough that audiences never think about them. For most of the centre's life that assumption held, which is why almost nobody could have named a trustee.

An arrangement that works only while nobody examines it is not robust. It is untested, and this week it is being tested in a courtroom and on a balance sheet at the same time.