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The Presidio of San Francisco has new managers. They have announced what they want to do with the park. Returning any of it to the Ohlone people is not on the list.
On May 14, the White House appointed six new members to the Presidio Trust board, the federal body that runs the 1,500-acre former Army post at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. The new members are Lynne Benioff, co-chair of TIME and a former chair of the Trust; Trevor Traina, former U.S. ambassador to Austria; John Bickford, managing partner at Local Capital Group; Stanford philanthropy educator Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen; James Burnham, general counsel at xAI and X; and Kyle Corcoran, a Marine veteran and chief financial officer of Redpanda, who holds the board’s veteran seat. Six members are presidential appointees. The seventh is the Interior Secretary or a designee.
On July 27, the Trust announced that the board had elected Benioff chair and Traina vice chair. It also named the board’s priorities. The board will guide “Presidio Forward – a suite of projects to improve the park’s infrastructure, open spaces, and buildings,” including “modernizing the Presidio’s power grid and creating 196 units of studio, one-bedroom, and two-bedroom apartments.”
The release describes the Presidio as “historically a home to native peoples.” It does not say which ones, and it does not mention any role for them in the park’s future.
A year and a half of upheaval
The new board is the result of an attack on the old one. In February 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14217, which named the Presidio Trust first on a list of agencies whose “non-statutory components and functions” were to be eliminated. It ordered them to reduce their statutory work “to the minimum presence and function required by law.” This spring, news reports said the President had terminated the previous board in early April.
The Muwekma Ohlone Tribe moved quickly after the 2025 order. In a March 5, 2025 letter to the President, Chairwoman Charlene Nijmeh formally asked him to “#LandBack the Presidio of San Francisco.” The letter said the Tribe’s people “have never ceded, surrendered, or in any way abrogated aboriginal title to the Presidio.” It noted that during the Spanish conquest the fortress was used as a prison for captured Native people before they were enslaved at Missions Dolores, Santa Clara and San José. The letter argued that Tribal stewardship would cost taxpayers less, draw on the Tribe’s “traditional ecological knowledge,” and offer visitors a cultural experience “no other operator can bring.”
The Muwekma Times covered the request when it was made. The letter was put into the public record again this year. It was one of the documents in the agenda packet when the Santa Clara City Council voted in June to support the Tribe’s federal recognition.
A tribe, not a footnote
The Muwekma Ohlone are not a nonprofit or an interest group. The Interior Department’s own 2002 decision found that the Tribe, as the Verona Band, had “unambiguous previous Federal acknowledgement until 1927.” The Muwekma Ohlone are a tribe the United States once recognized and then stopped recognizing without any act of Congress. When the Trust’s own release calls the Presidio “historically a home to native peoples,” it is describing them.
What happens now
The Presidio Trust Act of 1996 still governs the park, and the new board is following the course that law set: leasing buildings, adding housing and keeping the park self-funding. Changing who stewards the land would take a decision in Washington. It might come from Congress, or from an administration that has already shown it is willing to rethink the Trust.
For now, we have found no public response to the Tribe’s request from the White House or the new board. The Muwekma Times will be watching the board’s public meetings. We will keep asking a simple question: if the Presidio is going to be reinvented again, why shouldn’t the first people to steward it be part of the plan?
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