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.

Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi meets with KQED in her office in the San Francisco Federal Building, Thursday Jan. 30, 2025. (David M. Barreda/KQED)

“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.”

The mostly empty lawn of the Main Parade Ground in front of the Walt Disney Museum in the Presidio of San Francisco, on Mar. 13, 2020. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

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.