One of President Donald Trump’s last moves during his first term was to sign the “Great American Outdoors Act,” which was aimed at supporting the stewardship of our nation’s natural beauty.

The opening words of the proclamation said it best: “The American people treasure their national parks and other Federal lands, which provide awe-inspiring landscapes that serve as refuges to both visitors and wildlife; offer opportunities to learn, discover, and recreate; and allow us to connect with nature and reflect on our history.”

I agree with all of that. A nation is more than a mere tax farm. The land is as alive as those who inhabit it. The memory and identity of a people bleed into the soil and, by it, are sustained.

Now, however, there are indications that the Trump administration is perhaps less concerned with preserving our “awe-inspiring landscapes” this time around. At best, one can say that Trump is sending mixed signals.

On Feb. 19, the president signed an executive order to “dramatically” reduce the size of the federal government by hacking away at its bureaucratic appendages. That all sounds well and good, but among the entities that have been deemed “unnecessary,” one finds the Presidio Trust, an agency that oversees an important 1,500-acre park in San Francisco.

Originally, the park was the site of The Royal Fortress of Saint Francis, an 18^th-century Spanish stronghold. The U.S. seized it during the Mexican-American War and repurposed it for our military.  It was decommissioned in the early 1990s and transferred to the National Park Service. It has been a national historic landmark since 1962.

A Republican-majority Congress created the Presidio Trust in 1996 to oversee the park, which is visited by 7.5 million people each year and is considered the most beautiful part of a city now otherwise plagued by squalor. It has managed all that while being self-funded for the last decade. The park has not received money from Congress since 2013 and instead has relied on earnings associated with leasing historic buildings the trust has renovated, which makes its inclusion on a list of examples of government “waste and abuse” difficult to understand. If anything, the park is operated in such a way as to be the exact opposite of that.

One possible answer is spite. House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi helped create the trust, and, given the beef between the San Francisco Democrat and Trump, some see this move as a continuation of that feud. If true, it’s a slight carried out at the public’s expense. Republicans who chuckle at Trump “owning the libs” should remember that even in left-wing Marin County people have shifted in their political direction. More than 15 percent of the city’s voters cast a ballot for Trump last November, up from 9 percent in 2016. This seems like a trend to be encouraged rather than punished.

Leighton Woodhouse, an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker in Oakland, has another theory. It boils down to the cold, hard cash in the hands of techies who want to turn our beautiful landscapes into techno-industrial economic zones.

Some have attempted to dress the idea up by pointing to Trump’s “Freedom Cities” proposal from the campaign trail. But these plans could better be described as an attempt to build a West Coast Shenzhen, which is something like China’s version of Dubai—an artificial, deracinated global tech and finance hub.

One may point out that America already has a few of those, and that argument wouldn’t be wrong. The difference is that they would now receive the imprimatur of a president who came to power in opposition to exactly this sort of thing. Indeed, Woodhouse is worried that Trump’s executive order could clear the way for what has long been a fantasy of his newfound allies from Silicon Valley.

“Once the capital of the opposition to Trump’s first administration, San Francisco is now home to a clique of libertarian-leaning tech billionaires who have become the president’s greatest enablers and beneficiaries,” Woodhouse wrote in The San Francisco Standard. “The idea of building a centrally planned, Chinese Communist Party-inspired, utopian city from scratch through the brute force of federal power defies every possible conception of what it means to be a ‘conservative.’”

On top of this, the administration has also moved to cut staffing levels at national forests and lands that are enjoyed by more than 500 million people every year. Then there are also concerns that the administration might attempt to liquidate public lands in order to finance a sovereign wealth fund.

In Federalist 2, John Jay outlined the constituent parts of an American inheritance that he considered an immense blessing. Among those things was the land itself. “Providence has in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions, and watered it with innumerable streams, for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants.”

It would be a shame to sell off that “delight” piece by piece.