About a month after the government weakened limits on toxic pollution from coal plants, Edward Russo, the chairman of the White House Environmental Advisory Task Force, told a crowd in Washington about a little-known ambition of President Trump’s.
“He came to me once and said he wants to be the greatest environmental president since Teddy Roosevelt,” Mr. Russo said at a gala this month at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which has renamed itself the Trump-Kennedy Center.
“Most people don’t realize what the president has done in protecting land and preserving land,” he added, drawing a smattering of applause as waiters passed around flutes of Champagne.
For Mr. Russo, 80, a onetime consultant on environmental compliance for the Trump Organization’s golf courses, it was a return to a familiar theme.
Mr. Russo has long been a fringe voice arguing that Mr. Trump is actually an eco-warrior. In 2016, he self-published a book titled “Donald J. Trump: An Environmental Hero.” Now he’s making the case from inside the White House, where he is the sole member of the environmental task force he chairs.
To Mr. Russo’s critics, it’s unclear what, if anything, he has accomplished. The environmental task force has not publicly shared its work and Mr. Russo has kept a low profile, with the exception of confirming to Front Office Sports that he is working with Tiger Woods to redesign a public golf course in Washington.
Mr. Trump has derided the scientific consensus on climate change as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” His appointees have rolled back dozens of protections for the nation’s air, land, water and climate.
Yet Mr. Russo’s supporters said he has been quietly influential in pushing the administration to take some eco-friendly moves. For instance, they credit him with helping to negotiate an agreement to end the flow of raw sewage from the Tijuana River into California.
“Ed is pushing boundaries wherever he can to try to improve environmental outcomes,” said Barry Wray, the executive director of the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition and a friend of Mr. Russo’s. “That doesn’t mean he’s a magician.”
The event at the Kennedy Center celebrated the creation of the America the Beautiful Foundation, a nonpartisan group that has pledged to work with the administration and the private sector on conservation efforts. The keynote speakers were Mr. Russo and Michael Boren, the head of the U.S. Forest Service.
After the gala, Mr. Russo said in one of several interviews that he hoped to have colleagues on the environmental task force soon. “I know I have to hire them, but I just haven’t gotten around to it,” he said.
He lamented that journalists and activists were ignoring what he saw as Mr. Trump’s conservation achievements. “They don’t want to hear about the open spaces he protected,” Mr. Russo said.
The open spaces Mr. Russo cited, however, were not public sites like national parks or wildlife refuges. He pointed instead to the Blue Monster golf course at the Trump National Doral Golf Club in Miami, where Mr. Trump promised in 2022, as a private citizen, not to build a resort or residential property in exchange for a conservation-easement tax break of up to $323 million.
“You’d think he would get an honorable mention from the Sierra Club for that,” Mr. Russo said, referring to the nation’s oldest environmental group.
The executive director of the Sierra Club, Loren Blackford, said in response that Mr. Russo was engaged in greenwashing, a term that describes false or misleading claims made by companies or individuals about their environmental credentials.
“It is hardly an achievement for Donald Trump to be called an ‘environmental hero’ by someone who has been on his own payroll,” Ms. Blackford said in a statement. “The fact of the matter is that the Trump administration is the most anti-environment administration in American history, and no amount of greenwashing can put a fig leaf on that record.”
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, defended Mr. Russo’s work and the administration’s environmental record.
“President Trump tasked Mr. Russo to lead initiatives to create jobs and protect our natural resources, and he has done a phenomenal job,” she said in an email, adding that the administration was working “to ensure we have the cleanest air and water anywhere in the world while ensuring we are also energy dominant.”
From Landfills to Golf Clubs
The Russo-Trump partnership dates to 2001. It started with a spat over a New Jersey golf course.
At the time, Mr. Russo was living on the former estate of the automaker John DeLorean in Bedminster, N.J. Mr. Trump, who wanted to buy the property and build a golf club there, invited Mr. Russo to visit him at Trump Tower in New York.
At the meeting in Mr. Trump’s penthouse, Mr. Russo said the golf club would need to comply with an environmental ordinance that he had written while serving as chairman of the Bedminster Planning Board in the 1990s. Mr. Trump grew angry and refused, Mr. Russo later wrote in his book.
“I remember saying, ‘Donald Trump will never be able to put two Popsicle sticks together on that property — never,’” he wrote.
But two weeks later, after local politicians rebuffed Mr. Trump’s requests to waive the ordinance, he relented and agreed to follow the law. And in a surprise move, he hired Mr. Russo to oversee sustainability at what would become Trump National Golf Club Bedminster.
Mr. Russo quickly got to work. He secured a water permit from state regulators and planted a specialized grass seed mix that would prevent soil erosion while providing a habitat for migratory birds, including the grasshopper sparrow, eastern meadowlark and bobolink.
According to Mr. Russo’s book, he went on to ensure that all of the Trump Organization’s golf courses were environmental havens.
Some conservationists, however, said that he was an unreliable narrator.
Dean Naujoks of the Potomac Riverkeeper Network, which advocates for clean water, criticized the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia for cutting down trees on the banks of the Potomac River in 2019.
“There’s a lot more things that Trump has done that are really harmful to the environment, but certainly we didn’t appreciate that,” Mr. Naujoks said.
Growing up in New Jersey, Mr. Russo had not dreamed of working for a golf course developer. He didn’t even like the sport. After studying graphic arts and design at the Rochester Institute of Technology, he joined the Army and later ran a printing company in Newark.
But when a fire erupted at a landfill in Morris County, N.J., in 1979, his interest was piqued. He began campaigning to close the site, which was contaminated by toxic chemicals.
The landfill shuttered in 1981. After his first “environmental crusade,” as he called it, Mr. Russo moved to Bedminster, where he helped the planning board pass the ordinance that would anger Mr. Trump.
‘Make America Green Again’
When Mr. Trump took office in 2017, Mr. Russo offered his services to the new administration. At the time, he was the chief executive of WaterGen USA, the U.S. division of an Israeli company selling technology that extracts moisture from the air to make drinking water.
“I’m ready to help in any way. Let’s Make America Green Again,” Mr. Russo wrote in a December 2017 email to Kenneth Wagner, a senior adviser to Scott Pruitt, then the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Mr. Wagner responded that he had given Mr. Pruitt a signed copy of Mr. Russo’s book. “He got quite a kick out of it,” Mr. Wagner wrote.
The following year, the connection appeared to come in handy.
The agency awarded a research agreement to WaterGen USA, granting the company access to the E.P.A.’s staff and laboratory facilities, although it did not receive federal funding. The deal came after Mr. Russo discussed the technology with Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, raising the eyebrows of some ethics experts.
“It’s a bad look, but probably not technically against the law,” Cynthia Brown, the chief ethics counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit watchdog group, said in a recent interview.
At the start of Mr. Trump’s second term last year, Mr. Russo was living in Key West, Fla., and serving as the president of the Florida Keys Environmental Coalition and as the chief executive of RussKap Water, another company that converts humidity from the air into drinking water.
Then he got his newest title.
“I am pleased to announce that Ed Russo, an Environmental Expert, will lead our Environmental Advisory Task Force,” Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Jan. 10, 2025, adding, “Together, we will achieve American Energy DOMINANCE, rebuild our Economy and DRILL, BABY, DRILL.”
Two weeks later, Mr. Trump called Mr. Russo during a trip to wildfire-ravaged parts of Los Angeles and made an unusual request: Could Mr. Russo prevent all future wildfires in the state using private capital, not taxpayer money?
“I don’t ever want to see another forest fire in California,” Mr. Trump said, according to Mr. Russo’s memory of the conversation.
Since then, Mr. Russo has met with companies designing drones and other technologies that can detect early signs of wildfires, like small plumes of smoke, before the flames spread. He has also spoken to philanthropists with “very large pocketbooks,” he said, about funding efforts to plant fire-resistant trees.
In addition to leading the White House environmental task force, Mr. Russo is a senior adviser to Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator. He said he is serving as a “special government employee” and that both positions are unpaid.
Though he has an office at the E.P.A.’s headquarters in Washington, he often works remotely from Pompano Beach, Fla., where he has a rental property, and Louisville, Ky., where he and his wife care for his ailing mother-in-law.
“No, have not rented an apartment in D.C.,” Mr. Russo said by email. “I go there as little as possible.”
Wastewater But Not Warming
Mr. Russo’s portfolio also includes poop. Specifically, it includes billions of gallons of raw sewage that have flowed into the Tijuana River starting in Mexico and ending in California.
For years, the waste contaminated beaches, sickened residents and overwhelmed wastewater treatment plants in both countries. Last summer, Mr. Trump grew angry about negative media coverage and asked Mr. Russo to help address the situation.
Mr. Russo turned to a surprising source for help: Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, an immigration expert at the University of California, Los Angeles and liberal activist whom he had met at a conference. Dr. Hinojosa-Ojeda had connections in the office of President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, and within hours, Mr. Russo was meeting with the Mexican ambassador to the United States.
That meeting paved the way for Mr. Zeldin to sign an agreement in July 2025 with Alicia Bárcena Ibarra, Mexico’s environment secretary. The deal called for Mexico to construct two projects that would prevent as much as 10 million gallons of sewage a day from running into the river.
“Ed put everything in motion,” Dr. Hinojosa-Ojeda said.
One notable omission from Mr. Russo’s portfolio? Climate change, which many scientists and activists consider the most pressing environmental problem facing humanity, but which Mr. Trump calls a “hoax.”
Mr. Russo said he believes the planet is warming and he is not opposed to green technologies like electric cars. In fact, he used to drive an electric golf cart with solar panels on the roof.
But he said the environmental movement has focused on global warming at the expense of other issues like clean water.
“It’s unbelievable what we can do to really improve the planet if we can take our focus away from climate change,” he said.
He added that he was open to suggestions for his next area of focus.
“People can contact me,” Mr. Russo said. “If anybody has any serious or real solutions to improve our environmental status around the world, I look forward to hearing from them.”
Maxine Joselow covers climate change and the environment for The Times from Washington.
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