Kennedy Center Did not Contribute to Democrats
Quick Take
Online posts assert after it had been allocated $25 million at the COVID-19 stimulus package that $ 5 million was contributed by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to Democrats. No contributions have been given by the center; the law prohibited it.
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The stimulus package that passed with bipartisan support in March to facilitate COVID-19’s crippling effect on the market included $25 million to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Soon after that bill — the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act — became law, rumors began circulating online that the Washington D.C.-based arts center had awarded a $5 million contribution to Democrats.
One popular version of the rumor began on Twitter and later migrated to Facebook as a screenshot meme, framing the false claim this way:
Like this tweet surrounded the falsehood with details.
It’s a fact that the Kennedy Center ended a $250 million expansion in 2019 and that it got $41 million in federal funding for the fiscal year 2019. This was the center’s yearly appropriation for operations, maintenance, and repairs, which it gets as it acts as a memorial to President John F. Kennedy. The majority of the center’s budget comes from donations, in addition to some other resources and its earnings, such as gift shop sales. Those earned a combined $216 million in the financial year 2019.
It’s also true, as we mentioned, the Kennedy Center has been allotted $25 million at the stimulus package. That money is”to prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus, domestically or internationally,” according to the legislation, which specifies”deep cleansing” and”information technology to increase teamwork capability” as applications for the funds.
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President Donald Trump, who signed the act on March 27, defended the inclusion of the Kennedy Center in the stimulus package at a media briefing a couple of days before that, stating,”[T]hey’ve been basically closed. They have. I mean, this item was catastrophic to it.”
Nevertheless, the claim isn’t correct. The Kennedy Center did not give $5 million to the Democratic National Committee, nor can it be true that it” launders taxpayer money for the Democrats.”
The Kennedy Center is registered as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with the Internal Revenue Service and, according to the IRS, those tax-exempt charitable organizations are barred from making political contributions.
Just to be sure, we searched the Federal Election Commission database for political contributions and found no record for political spending of any sort in the Kennedy Center going back up to online records are available, which will be 1980.
Workers of the center are, of course, qualified to make contributions. However, any such contributions would come from their own money, not the funds of the center.
The author of this first tweet, conservative content founder Cari Kelemen, afterward added a clarification that stated:”[M]y initial tweet ought to have said: *Tomorrow* donates $5 M to the DNC. It was meant as a next-step hypothetical.”
But that has not stopped others from taking the first claim and replicating it in new articles.
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