The six trustees overseeing San Francisco's Presidio received a terse, perfunctory email from the White House on Wednesday informing them that their services were no longer required — effective immediately, thank you for your time, goodbye. No replacements have been named. No explanation was offered beyond the brevity of the message itself.
The fired trustees — Chairman Mark Buell, Vice Chair Chuck Collins, Lenore "Leni" Eccles, Patsy Ishiyama, Bonnie LePard, and Nicola Minor — were all Biden appointees. The Presidio Trust board operates with six presidential appointees and one seat designated for the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, which has been vacant for years. The board now has zero sitting members, per the San Francisco Chronicle, which first broke the news Saturday evening.
Buell, a native San Franciscan and decorated Vietnam veteran who has chaired the board since 2021, told the San Francisco Standard he was actually a little surprised it took this long. "We serve at the pleasure of the president," he said, adding that he "has hope that the new appointees will recognize the extraordinary nature of the Presidio and continue to carry out its mission." He noted that when Trump first took office in 2016, he "appointed some very qualified people to the board and they continued the operation of the place."
Over a Year in the Making
This didn't come out of nowhere. In February 2025, Trump issued an executive order calling for the Presidio Trust to be "eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law," branding it "unnecessary" in an order titled "Commencing the Reduction of Federal Bureaucracy." The Trust — which runs the 1,500-acre former military post at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge, covering everything from residential leases to hotels to a golf course — responded with a detailed 14-page report to the Office of Management and Budget defending its operations and financial independence. It never received a formal reply from the administration, according to the Chronicle.
The Trust's financial case is genuinely difficult to argue with. The organization generated $182 million in operating revenue in 2024 — the most in its history — and has not received federal appropriations since 2013, instead funding itself through commercial and residential leases and philanthropic donations. Since becoming financially independent, it has generated $350 million in net income and created more than $1.1 billion in value for the national park. The park currently houses 3,100 residents in 1,400 homes at a 97% occupancy rate, and leases 2.1 million square feet of commercial space to more than 300 businesses employing roughly 4,000 people at a 96% commercial occupancy rate — easily the highest of any sub-market in San Francisco.
The Pelosi Factor
It's hard to discuss Trump's sustained hostility toward the Presidio Trust without noting who helped create it. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi was a driving force behind the legislation that established the Trust in 1996, and Trump's executive order targeting the agency was widely read as at least partly motivated by his long-running animosity toward her, as noted by the Chronicle. Pelosi herself said at the time: "I don't take it personally if he wants to insult something as innovative and wonderful as the Presidio."
In a statement Saturday night, Pelosi called the firings "disappointing" and said the Presidio "will continue to be protected by the strength of the legislation which created it." She praised the departing board members and expressed hope that Trump's new appointees would follow the lead of previous Republican-era trustees. "Previous Republican appointees to the board have respected the Presidio," she said. "We hope that this president will look to them with guidance on appointments." That's a polite way of saying: please don't break the thing that has been working spectacularly.
What Happens Now
The Trust itself is taking a diplomatic stance, noting in a statement to the Chronicle that it had been "anticipating that we would ultimately receive new board members" and is "awaiting information on the new appointments." The organization's day-to-day operations aren't immediately threatened — it still has staff, a CEO search underway following Jean Fraser's planned departure, and the financial reserves to function without a board for a period. Legally, the Trust was created by an act of Congress, which means it can't simply be abolished by executive fiat, no matter what the OMB says.
The more pressing question is who Trump nominates to fill the six seats. The statute requires that no appointees be federal employees, at least three must live in the Bay Area, and one must be a U.S. military veteran. His first-term appointments, which included Lynne Benioff and others from the San Francisco civic world, were broadly well-regarded — even former Trump appointee Marie Hurabiell defended the Trust after the 2025 executive order, calling it "an extremely well-run, self-sustaining entity." As the one notable exception to that pattern — radio host Michael Savage, who spent his tenure trying to remove a Japanese American internment memorial from a Presidio museum — demonstrated, the appointments matter. The Presidio's 7 million annual visitors are probably hoping for a repeat of the competent first-term appointments rather than the Savage-shaped footnote.
