Trump Moves to Slash Presidio Trust, Striking at a Beloved Jewel of San Francisco Parks

On a sunny Thursday in San Francisco’s Presidio, groups of elementary school students ate lunch outside the Walt Disney Museum, people waited in line at food trucks lining the lawn and groups chatted in red low-back chairs overlooking the water.

Heidi Cook, who’s visiting from Maine, was spending her final day in the city sitting just north of the lawn, looking out at the bridge with a friend.

“We were just talking about how absolutely beautiful this place is, and that a group of people had the vision to make this happen,” she said.

That vision appears to be threatened by President Trump, who signed a sweeping executive order Wednesday night to all but eliminate certain federal agencies, including the Presidio Trust.

The trust, which Congress formed in 1996 to manage and protect the historic 1,500-acre park that looks out on the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay, is one of four agencies named in the “Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy” order, which calls for shrinking agencies that the administration deems “unnecessary” to “minimize government waste and abuse.” They have been ordered to eliminate their non-statutory operations “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law” and reduce their statutory function to the minimum required by law.

“The Presidio Trust is statutory, and it has been protected from assaults over time by its statutory strength,” Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D–San Francisco) said in a statement Wednesday night. “We will be carefully reviewing the language of the President’s executive order and its purpose.”

The order also targets the Inter-American Foundation, the United States African Development Foundation, and the United States Institute of Peace.

Whether the order will face legal contest wasn’t immediately clear Thursday, but Californians have already mounted multiple fights against Trump in court since he took office.

San Francisco Supervisor Stephen Sherrill, who represents the park area, said that while it’s still unclear exactly what the order will do, he is working with the trust and local lawmakers to protect the Presidio.

“The only thing that this does is create completely unnecessary fear,” he told KQED. “I’ll be incredibly supportive of our city attorneys and of our federal officials in pushing back at this. We have to remember there are 3,000 San Francisco residents that live in the Presidio. These are my constituents; this is deeply, deeply personal to me and to my neighbors.”

On Thursday in the park, Elizabeth Bradburn’s goldendoodle Charles was among about a dozen running off-leash.

“We definitely bring the dog here and meet other dog parents and families,” she said, adding that her family often brings visiting friends down to see the bridge and eat at restaurants in the Presidio. “I think it’s a destination spot for a lot of people from outside of San Francisco, but then we who live here also use it regularly on a daily basis.”

The U.S. military’s Base Realignment and Closure process in the 1990s shuttered a number of old Army bases, including the one that used to occupy the Presidio land. It could have become a national park at the time, said Jim Wunderman, who was working for San Francisco Mayor Frank Jordan, but the Republican-led federal government pushed back.

Instead, the Presidio Trust was formed, creating a public-private partnership that lessened the financial burden on the Department of the Interior and garnered bipartisan support. The agency would get federal money to help it transition from an Army base and work closely with the National Park Service, but it had to become financially independent by 2013.

A spokesperson for the trust said it “has not received regular annual appropriations from Congress since 2013,” and now relies on funds earned by leasing historic buildings it has renovated, including the Walt Disney Museum, the Bay School and many restaurants.

The agency will submit a report to the Office of Management and Budget in two weeks, as required by the order, but is confident that its operations are statutorily based, according to a spokesperson.

“The Presidio is a one-of-a-kind national park site, and all of its services and business will continue to operate as normal, welcoming visitors and serving all who live and work here,” the trust’s statement reads.

The national landmark has been on Republican lawmakers’ radar as a place to recoup funds for weeks, first floated in a 50-page list of potential cost reductions to pay for Trump’s immigration crackdown and tax cuts in January. The list that circulated among GOP leaders called for the Presidio Trust to return $200 million secured by Pelosi in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to make infrastructure upgrades.

The list claimed that the way the transfer of the funds was requested “was not consistent with standard agency practices for selecting priority deferred maintenance projects,” but Presidio spokespeople have said the money is already in use. It’s unclear whether these funds will be affected by the order.

Pelosi said during a press conference Thursday that it was unclear if those funds could be clawed back.

“We don’t know,” she said. “That’s a matter of law. They are committed and when they are committed there are certain standards that are examined.”

“I think the president’s targeting everyone,” Pelosi continued. “But when we wrote our bill, we wrote it, as I said, prepared for an assault. The statute is very tight and purposeful.”