Trump ousts all six Presidio Trust board members in San Francisco

San Francisco’s Presidio now faces a basic governance question: who controls the park’s money, development decisions and public access after President Donald Trump terminated all six members of the Presidio Trust board?

The White House personnel office sent termination letters to the trustees, and the Presidio Trust said it had been informed that all appointments were over and that it was waiting for new members. The board had been appointed under President Joe Biden. Mark Buell, the board’s chairman, said his term had technically expired last year, but the trust’s governing law allows trustees to remain in place until they are replaced.

The Presidio Trust is not a typical federal park bureaucracy. It was created by Congress with bipartisan support in 1996, began operating in 1998 and has run the former military post as a self-financing public trust since it stopped receiving annual appropriations in 2013. Under its structure, six board seats are presidential appointments and the seventh belongs to the U.S. secretary of the interior or a designee. The board acts only by vote, so wiping out the full membership leaves the city’s most visible federal-land authority in the hands of incoming appointees.

That matters because the Presidio is not a sleepy administrative outpost. The trust’s 2024 performance report says the park drew 9.5 million visits last year, while Presidio Tunnel Tops alone had 3.8 million visits since opening two years earlier. Residential occupancy averaged 96 percent and commercial occupancy 93 percent, and the trust reported $182 million in earned operating revenue in 2024. A March 2025 submission to the Office of Management and Budget said the Presidio houses more than 3,100 residents and 300 businesses that employ about 4,000 people.

The trust has also made major infrastructure investments with that revenue. It says it has generated more than $1.1 billion in value to taxpayers since 2013 and rehabilitated more than 80 percent of the park’s buildings since 1998. Its latest reporting says the park is replacing Army-era utility systems, including a power station that serves two-thirds of the Presidio.

Nancy Pelosi called the firings disappointing and said she hoped to work with new board members. She also noted that the Presidio received $200 million in Interior Department funding in 2023 for utilities and infrastructure. KQED reported that the seventh seat reserved for the Interior Department was already vacant, underscoring how quickly the board’s balance can shift.

The Presidio sits on land that was once a military post and is now one of San Francisco’s defining open spaces, bordering the Golden Gate and the western edge of the city. Its lands are part of the traditional territory of the Yelamu, a local tribe of the Ramaytush Ohlone peoples. After the board purge, the central issue is whether the Presidio remains a locally shaped civic landscape or becomes a more direct instrument of federal control.