On the surface, Monday's Supreme Court ruling that keeps Lisa Cook in place as a Federal Reserve governor for now was a win for believers that the central bank works best when insulated from the day-to-day control of the president. The details aren't so clear.

The big picture: The court punted on several key questions that will determine how much ability President Trump and his successors have to fire Fed governors.

• Moreover, the decision was closer than many court watchers anticipated, with four of six conservative justices dissenting.

• Another key ruling Monday grants the president broad latitude to fire heads of independent agencies that aren't the Fed, contrary to a 91-year-old precedent. It shows deep skepticism among the conservative majority about the constitutionality of Congress insulating agencies from presidential control.
• Fed independence is hanging by a narrow legal asterisk citing America's long, tenuous history with central banking.

State of play: Cook will remain on the Board of Governors following the ruling. But the Supreme Court gave little guidance on how high the bar is for a president to fire a Fed governor for cause, nor did it indicate what procedures a president must follow to overcome that bar.

• In Monday's Trump v. Cook decision, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the 5-4 majority, rejected both the Trump administration's arguments that a Fed governor can be fired over mere concerns about their integrity and the argument made by Cook's attorneys that she can be fired only for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance."
• "Having rejected both parties' positions, we need not fully demarcate the contours of 'cause' today."

Of note: The court similarly suggested that Cook was entitled to some due process to establish cause, rather than to be fired on presidential whim. But it declined to lay out exactly what that should be.

• "At minimum, Cook was entitled to some explanation of the evidence at issue, some avenue for a response, and a deadline by which a response would be due."
• But Roberts then wrote that the court can only assess the "validity and sufficiency of such charges" after the president sets up this legal process and Cook has responded.

What they're saying: "The court is now in the position of procrastinators everywhere: let's let future SCOTUS handle that one," quipped Peter Conti-Brown, the University of Pennsylvania legal scholar.

Between the lines: Cook's role as a governor has been in legal limbo for 10 months now, and we still don't know exactly what the standard is for the president to fire her or how he can legally do so.

• If anything, the majority opinion seemed to bend over backward not to prejudge those issues. That raises the possibility that a president has wide latitude to fire Fed governors for pretext so long as they dot a few more i's and cross more t's than Trump did in the Cook case.
• If Trump or a future president wants to fire Fed governors over policy differences, it raises the possibility they can find any ticky-tack rationale, convene a legal process run by sycophants and achieve the same goal.

Reality check: The original sin here is that Congress, in establishing the Fed, left things vague as to what would constitute "cause" for a president to fire a Fed governor and how that cause should be properly adjudicated.

• The Federal Reserve Act says only that governors' terms are 14 years "unless sooner removed for cause by the President" without giving more detail.

The bottom line: If Congress wants to create clearer guardrails around the firing of Fed governors, it will need to pass legislation. In the meantime, the protections offered by the courts are limited, and still unresolved.

Google's electricity, water use and greenhouse gas emissions all climbed to record levels last year as the company raced to build more AI infrastructure.

Why it matters: Google has invested more aggressively than perhaps any other tech company in clean energy, yet its environmental report released Tuesday shows how difficult it has become to keep climate goals on track amid the AI buildout.

Driving the news: Google's data centers are becoming more efficient, but the company's AI infrastructure is growing even faster.

• "This rapid expansion in energy demand is a reality we must manage actively, and we're committed to ensuring that the growth of AI doesn't become a rationale for lowering our environmental standards," the report states.

By the numbers: Most are going up.

• Electricity demand jumped 37% — up from a 27% increase last year and roughly 3.5 times higher than in 2019.
• Greenhouse gas emissions rose 18%, the largest annual increase Google has reported, driven largely by manufacturing AI hardware, including chips and servers.
• Water consumption climbed 34% to 10.9 billion gallons, more than double 2021 levels. Data centers accounted for most of the increase.

Zoom in: Rapid growth has shifted the benchmark from cutting total emissions to preventing them from rising even faster.

• Google signed a record 12 gigawatts of clean energy agreements and held its share of carbon-free electricity roughly flat despite soaring demand.
• Electricity-related emissions fell 2% from 2024, compared with a 12% decline the year before.

Reality check: Tech companies have been releasing this type of annual report for several years — Google since 2016. Until recently, they have served as a chance for tech companies to mostly boast about clean energy and climate accomplishments.

• Increasingly, with the AI boom fueling unprecedented growth, these reports are a reality check on those same ambitions.

Catch up quick: The rapidly growing energy and water use of data centers is coming under increasing scrutiny as the tech industry races to dominate on AI.

The intrigue: Google devoted a larger section this year to AI's potential environmental benefits, continuing to argue the technology can reduce emissions elsewhere in the economy.

• It expanded from five initiatives with estimated emissions benefits last year to nine this year.

What we're watching: Other tech giants, like Microsoft and Amazon, are due to release their annual environmental reports in the coming weeks.

The bottom line: Once-routine sustainability reports have become a closely watched scorecard for whether AI companies can match their climate promises with the infrastructure boom they're building.

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Immigration advocates are celebrating the Supreme Court's decision to uphold birthright citizenship as a win for children, families and the Constitution.

• But the decision was largely anticipated — and it's just one of a growing wave of worries over policies involving citizenship and immigration.

The big picture: Legal disputes remain over the Trump administration's speedy deportation campaign, a ramped-up effort to revoke citizenship and recent Supreme Court decisions that undercut immigration protections.

• "We need to keep fighting," says Efren Olivares, the vice president of litigation and legal strategy at The National Immigration Law Center.

Driving the news: "Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights— to freely participate in our political community," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the five-justice majority.

Yes, but: Even with birthright citizenship intact, the federal government can still erect barriers to the rights that come with it, Robert Chang, the executive director of the UC Irvine Law School's Center for Law and Equality, says.

• "In any instance where citizenship is a requirement, the federal government has so many levers to push," he says, like raising the bar to prove citizenship or immigration status.

Between the lines: Advocates and analysts see the administration shifting its strategy away from the highly confrontational spectacle of the Noem-Bovino era toward quieter changes.

• One example is the Trump administration's plan to file at least 250 denaturalization cases by October, which the DOJ confirmed to Axios via email.
• Todd Schulte, the president of immigration and criminal justice advocacy group FWD.us says it's "an all-of-government approach... instead of highly visible jump-out stuff we saw in the federalized deployments."

Zoom out: Without much fanfare, the administration has recipients of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, or Dreamers, holding their breath as status renewals are slow-walked.

• Immigration hardliners believe the administration is effectively quietly ending DACA while attempting to avoid political fallout, Axios' Brittany Gibson reports.

And while Tuesday's decision is a win for immigration advocates, it comes just days after the Supreme Court cleared the path for the administration to reject asylum seekers who haven't yet crossed the southern border and end humanitarian protections for Syrian and Haitian nationals.

• The 6-3 decision that the Temporary Protected Status program is largely shielded from judicial review has ramifications for hundreds of thousands living and working in the U.S., many of whom already had their protections under threat.
• "People end up in this twilight zone where they're here, they're in jeopardy, they lose work authorizations," Chang says, noting the vast resources that would be needed to actually conduct mass deportations.

The bottom line: The high court's record on immigration is far from set, with other major immigration policy debates — like those over fast-tracked deportations and mandatory detention — working through the courts.

Go deeper: Scoop: Trump escalates citizenship crackdown