White House fires all six Presidio Trust board members abruptly

The White House abruptly dismissed all six members of the Presidio Trust board, a move that reached far beyond Washington personnel turnover and into a semi-independent federal body that manages 1,500 acres at the edge of San Francisco.

The trustees were told in terse emails that their dismissals were effective immediately, with no replacements announced. Chairman Mark Buell said he received a brief, perfunctory message thanking him and the other trustees for their service. The six removed members were Buell, Vice Chair Chuck Collins, Lenore Eccles, Patsy Ishiyama, Bonnie LePard and Nicola Miner, all of them appointed by President Joe Biden.

The Presidio Trust is unusual in the federal system. Congress created it in 1996 in the Omnibus Parks and Public Lands Management Act to manage the former Army post at the Presidio of San Francisco, a national historic landmark designated in 1962. Its board includes six presidential appointees plus the secretary of the interior or a designee as a seventh seat, but that Interior seat has been vacant for years. The trust has described itself as a self-sustaining operation that has not required annual congressional appropriations since 2013.

The firings followed Donald Trump’s February 19, 2025 executive order seeking to eliminate the trust and other agencies by reducing them to the minimum required by law. The order called for those entities to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law,” underscoring the administration’s push to narrow the footprint of federal institutions it views as expendable.

That mattered because the Presidio has become one of the clearest examples of a successful public-private stewardship model in the country. The trust’s fiscal 2024 report said the park was thriving, with residential occupancy at 96% and commercial occupancy at 93%. It also said a new power station replaced Army-era utility systems and now delivers energy to two-thirds of the Presidio.

Recent projects show what is at stake. The Presidio Tunnel Tops, which opened in 2022, cost $118 million, with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy raising $98 million of that total. The site, overlooking Crissy Field, the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay, has become a local landmark and a national test case for how federal land can be transformed without handing it over entirely to private control.

For supporters, the dismissals signaled an attempt to weaken an agency that has proven it can operate independently and still deliver major public benefits. For critics inside Trump’s orbit, the trust looked like a federal entity whose success only sharpened the case for shrinking or eliminating it.