from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The Courses Digest, Labs Digest, and Exams Digest Bundle gives you unlimited access to expertly crafted online courses, interactive labs and study tools. Whether you’re aiming for industry-recognized certifications or expanding your tech expertise, this bundle will help you get there with courses on CompTIA, AWS, Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, and more. It’s on sale for $70 for a limited time.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

⁠⁠This couple couldn’t find good Greek yoghurt in S’pore, so they built a factory from scratch

Most yoghurt consumed in Singapore has travelled thousands of kilometres before it reaches the fridge.

It typically starts at a dairy farm in Europe, Australia, or the United States, before being processed, packaged, shipped across oceans, and stocked on supermarket shelves weeks later.

Singaporean Haanee Tyebally and her American husband and co-founder, Braedan Tegenfeldt, both 36, wanted to change that. The result is Annie’s All Natural, which claims to be Singapore’s first commercial producer of Greek yoghurt and cultured creams, made in a 2,000 sq ft factory in Mandai.

We spoke with Haanee about how she and Braedan—both with backgrounds in international development and no prior experience in food science, dairy, or manufacturing—built the factory from the ground up and a supply chain that now serves some of the country’s most prestigious hotels.

A family recipe

Annie’s story began not in Singapore, but in Yangon, Myanmar, where the couple grew up and built their lives together.

Braedan founded the business in 2014 after spotting a gap in the market. His mother had begun making Greek yoghurt at home after a holiday in Greece, recreating a staple of his American upbringing in Myanmar.

At the time, the country was seeing an influx of returning nationals and expatriates, but good-quality Greek yoghurt was virtually impossible to find. Seeing the opportunity, Braedan decided to turn the family recipe into a business.

Alongside his full-time job, Braedan started producing artisanal Greek yoghurt out of his parents’ garage, made in small batches and entirely by hand. Gradually, the business grew steadily from supplying small luxury hotels such as Belmond’s Governor’s Residence to being stocked at Myanmar’s largest grocery stores.

Haanee, who was working in Myanmar at the time for an NGO focused on family planning and women’s health, wasn’t involved in the business then. However, she later joined as his co-founder when the pair eventually moved to Singapore in 2020.

During the circuit breaker, the couple watched supermarket shelves empty as supply chains strained, and found nothing locally made that matched the quality of the Greek yoghurt they’d been eating and producing in Myanmar.

We didn’t really see anything that was comparable that was available in Singapore—something made either locally or within our region, something high quality, made of really good milk.

Haanee Tyebally

The same gap Braedan had spotted years earlier in Myanmar had emerged again, this time in Singapore.
That convinced the couple to make a bold move: build a production facility from scratch and establish a new life in Singapore.

From July 2021 to early 2023, the couple spent nearly two years building the facility from the ground up. They commissioned custom machinery from Italy, installed cold rooms, fitted out a food-grade processing plant, and ran batch after batch through R&D until they were satisfied with the final product.

The investment came close to six figures—a scale that was far beyond anything they had undertaken in Yangon.

But what makes Annie’s different?

The answer lies in almost every step of its production process.

Firstly, it’s the brand’s flavours. Annie’s sources grass-fed, free-range milk from New Zealand, specifically from a dairy processor powered by geothermal energy—one of the few in the world to run on a renewable energy source.

According to Haanee, sourcing milk from Southeast Asia wasn’t a serious option because the region’s tropical climate isn’t well suited for dairy cows. She also believes grass-fed milk offers a better micronutrient profile while reflecting higher animal welfare standards.

The brand is equally intentional about its flavours. Rather than sticking to the usual fruit varieties, Annie’s offers six options: plain, vanilla bean, passionfruit, ginger, coffee, and its newest flavour, raspberry.

The biggest difference, however, is how the yoghurt is made.

While many products labelled “Greek yoghurt” achieve their thick texture through mechanised straining or added milk proteins and solids, Annie’s follows the traditional method. After the milk is cultured, the yoghurt is transferred into large cloth bags and left to strain naturally for 14 to 16 hours.

According to Haanee, this slow process naturally concentrates the yoghurt’s proteins, fats, and flavour, creating a dense, creamy texture without thickeners, stabilisers, emulsifiers, or other unnecessary additives.

We really want consumers to have the experience of eating a super minimal product that’s made in a way that takes time, effort, intention, and care.

Haanee Tyebally

Building a client base from scratch

When Annie’s officially launched in Singapore in 2023, it had no distribution network, no established connections in Singapore’s F&B industry, and no existing retail relationships. What they had was yoghurt they believed in.

Their first strategy was to target the hospitality sector.

Hotels, they reasoned, consumed large volumes of yoghurt on breakfast buffets, had stringent food safety standards that played to their strengths, and had procurement teams who could evaluate products on merit. Getting through those doors required a lot of cold emails and door-knocking, but it eventually paid off.

Today, Annie’s supplies an impressive roster of properties: Shangri-La on Orange Grove Road, Fullerton Hotel and Fullerton Bay Hotel, Sofitel City Centre, JW Marriott South Beach, W Hotel in Sentosa, and multiple Resorts World properties, including the newly opened Lis Hotel. Hotels and restaurants now account for the bulk of the company’s sales.

Beyond Greek yoghurt, Annie’s also produces sour cream, crème fraîche, and labneh—a lightly salted yoghurt cheese—with culturing times of between 24 and 40 hours to meet the needs of its hospitality and foodservice clients.

On the retail front, Annie’s has been stocked at Little Farms since shortly after launch, a partnership Haanee shared was built on shared values around clean ingredients and transparent sourcing. The brand has also expanded online through RedMart, with each 120g tub retailing for S$4.20.

For now, though, major supermarket chains still remain out of reach.

High listing fees, upfront production costs, and long payment cycles pose significant barriers for a small producer, though Haanee hopes Annie’s will eventually make its way onto mainstream supermarket shelves so more Singaporeans can access its products.

A growing market

Today, Annie’s produces more than 4,000kg of Greek yoghurt each month, processing over 8,000 litres of milk.

Haanee attributes that growth to changing consumer habits. Once a niche product, Greek yoghurt has become increasingly mainstream as social media, greater nutrition awareness, and more well-travelled consumers drive demand for high-protein foods.

She also noted that Greek yoghurt’s naturally lower lactose content than regular yoghurt makes it well-suited to Asian consumers, many of whom are lactose intolerant.

To reach more customers, Annie’s has been doing pop-ups at various farmers’ markets like City Spouts, AIR restaurant at Dempsey and the Singapore Agro-Food Enterprises Federation over the years.

That said, the team remains small, comprising six full-time and part-time staff, with Haanee and Braedan still directly involved in daily production.

Haanee shared that labour is one of the industry’s most persistent challenges. Finding people willing to do the physical, time-intensive work of food manufacturing in Singapore is increasingly difficult in the F&B sector.

The other running challenge is cost. Producing at a small, artisanal scale with premium ingredients in Singapore means that its price point cannot compete with multinational dairy brands that benefit from industrial-scale economics.

Annie’s yoghurt isn’t cheap, and Haanee doesn’t shy away from that, but she believes that her products provide good value for customers for a high-quality dairy producer.

To reduce costs, Annie’s encourages its corporate clients to participate in its very own glass jar recycling programme. It collects, sterilises, and reuses yoghurt jars for its next batch of production.

In the past year alone, close to 40,000 jars have been recovered and reincorporated into the supply chain rather than going to waste.

In it for the long run

Haanee is cautious about trend dependency.

Greek yoghurt is having a moment between viral social media content, growing protein consciousness, and a more nutritionally savvy consumer, but the goal at Annie’s isn’t to ride the wave. It’s to outlast it.

“I hope that our products build beyond trends and that people actually eat them—one, because they enjoy them, but two, because they are really good for you,” she said.

For a brand that spent close to six figures building a factory here before selling a single jar, that long-term thinking is baked into everything Annie’s does, from its values to the 14-hour strain. It’s a business built around doing things the hard way, because the founders believe the product speaks for itself.

We want to make sure we are doing the best by our customers and making the best product we can and standing by every ingredient we use.

Haanee Tyebally

• Find out more about Annie’s All Natural here.
• Read other articles about Singaporean businesses here.

Also Read: ⁠This 52 Y/O kopi business roasts 1,000kg of coffee every month & is winning over younger drinkers

Featured Image Credit: Annie’s All Natural

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

There’s another World Cup category in today’s Connections: Sports Edition, and some of the other clues are World Cup-related, too. If you’re struggling with the puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Where are you sitting?

Green group hint: Soccer (OK, football) group

Blue group hint: Roar!

Purple group hint: Gosling or Reynolds.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Stadium seating sections.

Green group: CONCACAF teams in World Cup.

Blue group: Teams with Lion nicknames.

Purple group: Ryans.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is stadium seating sections. The four answers are bleachers, mezzanine, suite and upper deck.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is CONCACAF teams in World Cup. The four answers are Canada, Curaçao, Mexico and United States.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is teams with Lion nicknames. The four answers are Columbia, Detroit, England and Penn State.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is Ryans. The four answers are Crouser, Day, Fitzpatrick and Poles.

Toughest Connections: Sports Edition categories

The Connections: Sports Edition puzzle can be tough, but it really depends on which sports you know the most about. My husband aces anything having to do with Formula 1, my best friend is a hockey buff, and I can answer any question about Minnesota teams.

That said, it’s hard to pick the toughest Connections categories, but here are some I found exceptionally mind-blowing.

#1: Serie A Clubs. Answers: Atalanta, Juventus, Lazio, Roma.

#2: WNBA MVPs. Answers: Catchings, Delle Donne, Fowles and Stewart.

#3: Premier League team nicknames. Answers: Bees, Cherries, Foxes and Hammers.

#4: Homophones of NBA player names. Answers: Barns, Connect, Heart and Hero.

Easemate.ai launched in 2025 with a simple pitch: one platform for everything AI.

It doesn’t make you choose between a chat assistant, an image generator, or a video tool. You get all three, alongside study utilities, document readers, and image editing features. The range of supported models is equally wide, covering GPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Grok, Kimi K2, and Qwen 3 on the chat side alone.

Google is upgrading its AI image generation capabilities today with the debut of Nano Banana 2 (NB2) Lite, an optimized model built for rapid execution and tight infrastructure budgets.

Technically designated as Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Image on Google’s application programming interface (API), NB2 Lite is positioned as the fastest and most cost-effective option within Google’s creative model family, capable of generating images in 4 seconds at a flat rate of $0.034 per 1,000 images.

It’s available immediately to enterprise developers through Google AI Studio, the Gemini API, and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (GEAP).

It’s not quite as fast or customizable as startup Krea’s new, partially open licensed Krea 2 Turbo (which allows for open modification and commercial usage by small enterprises), but the big selling point here is the low price and bundling with Google’s larger Workplace and AI offerings.

This release lands alongside the public preview of Gemini Omni Flash, a multimodal conversational video generation and editing model.

However, while Omni Flash represents Google’s long-term bet on agentic video manipulation, Nano Banana 2 Lite is the immediate infrastructure workhorse, tailored specifically for high-throughput commercial application, rapid programmatic prototyping, and automated asset generation workflows.

The technology of speed

At its core, Nano Banana 2 Lite is built directly upon the Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite architecture, engineered to solve the persistent tension between computational latency and operational overhead.

In high-velocity enterprise frameworks, traditional large-scale image models introduce significant friction due to multi-second processing delays and high per-token costs. Google’s new lightweight model circumvents these bottlenecks by generating a standard 1k resolution image in under four seconds.

This represents a stark performance optimization over its legacy predecessor, Nano Banana (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image), achieved through targeted enhancements in core baseline capabilities.

According to internal documentation, the model features upgraded world knowledge for drafting rough data visualizations and contextual layouts, enhanced character consistency to preserve identity across continuous image streams, and localized typographic rendering capabilities.

The trade-offs inherent to this “Lite” designation are transparently outlined in Google’s technical data sheets.

Unlike the broader standard Nano Banana 2 (NB2) and Nano Banana Pro (NB Pro) lines, which support versatile multi-resolution scaling across 1k, 2k, and 4k outputs, Nano Banana 2 Lite restricts its resolution support exclusively to a 1k canvas. Yet, within this specialized operational boundary, the architectural tuning yields surprising competitive efficiencies. In standardized internal benchmarks, Nano Banana 2 Lite achieved a Text to Image arena Elo score of 1251. This score comfortably eclipses the legacy NB1 score of 1151 and remarkably edges out the bulkier, more expensive NB Pro, which sits at 1245 in the same text-to-image track. For specialized editing tasks, the model maintains a single-image editing Elo score of 1308 and a multiple-image editing score of 1294, providing a highly optimized sweet spot for real-time applications.

A boost to rapid prototyping and marketing research

From a product implementation perspective, Google is marketing Nano Banana 2 Lite not as an artistic engine, but as an invisible, high-throughput utility layer for automated workflows. T

he target demographic spans software engineers, programmatic ad platforms, and digital commerce applications where rapid iteration is crucial.

Think real-time A/B testing for thousands of targeted advertising variations or immediate layout adjustments on localized storefronts. Google highlights three specific production environments where the model excels.

First, its world knowledge allows systems to instantly draft accurate contextual scenes or location-specific mockups.

Second, its character consistency handles the rigorous demands of storyboarding tools and digital fashion try-ons, where keeping object fidelity static across sequential generations is historically difficult.

Finally, its text rendering improvements mean legible copy can be embedded directly into rapid ad generations, allowing teams to verify layout compatibility across various languages on the fly.

Developers should note, however, that while native image generation operates with lowest-latency profiles, conditional image editing tasks may experience marginally higher response times due to the secondary processing layers required to rewrite existing pixels.

Licensing and acess

The deployment mechanism of Nano Banana 2 Lite via proprietary APIs underscores an enterprise-first commercial licensing strategy.

Unlike open-weights models that developers can pull down to run locally under open-source frameworks like Apache 2.0 or modified OpenRAIL licenses, Google’s latest models remain tightly integrated into its managed cloud stack.

For enterprises, this eliminates the operational complexity of hosting hardware but binds usage strictly to Google’s metered pricing terms.Financially, this commercial strategy is highly aggressive.

At $0.034 per 1,000 images across both AI Studio and GEAP channels, the model undercuts the older, less capable NB1 model ($0.039) and slashes costs dramatically compared to standard NB2 ($0.067) and NB Pro ($0.134) tiers. Internal notes indicate that the model delivers roughly 60–70% of the general capability of NB2 and NB Pro while executing at significantly higher speeds and a fraction of the cost.

By lowering the fiscal barrier to high-frequency image generation, Google is making a direct play to lock enterprise developers into its commercial platform ecosystem.

The European Space Agency released a satellite image that shows the upheaval left behind by the pair of earthquakes that rocked Venezuela last week.

The image was created using observations from the Sentinel-1 satellites, which are part of the European Copernicus program. These satellites do not take conventional photographs; instead, they use their radars to “illuminate” the Earth’s surface and record the time it takes for the signal to return to the sensor. By comparing two measurements of the same location taken on different dates, scientists can determine whether the ground has shifted, even when that shift is too small to be seen with the naked eye.

To create the map, scientists compared an observation taken on June 18—one week before the earthquakes—with another taken on June 25, the day after the pair of earthquakes that were mangitude 7.2 and 7.5 respectively. This comparison allowed them to construct what’s known as an interferogram revealing how much the ground deformed following the event.

This satellite image shows the area around Caracas, Venezuela, which was struck by a double earthquake on Wednesday, June 24.

Advertisement

Illustration courtesy of Copernicus Sentinel/ESA

The ESA explains that what stands out in the map are the repeating colored bands that form horizontal rows in the north. Each complete repetition of the sequence—blue, green, yellow, red, and blue again—represents a fixed increase in the change in distance between the satellite and the ground. The more complete cycles that appear between one area and another, the greater the cumulative ground displacement.

The pattern of bands observed in the northern part of the map corresponds to the region at the epicenter of the earthquakes, which is also where the main deformation occurred. The bands roughly follow the path of the San Sebastián fault system, one of the main tectonic structures in northern Venezuela. The ESA estimates that the displacement in the region was on the order of 30 centimeters (12 inches).

Rescue teams continue to search for victims and work through collapsed buildings in the aftermath of the earthquake that struck Venezuela and other regions of the Caribbean. June 28, 2026. Caraballeda, La Guaira.

Photograph: Jesus Vargas/Getty Images

Legal

Nadiem Makarim vows to appeal sentence given he was found not to have profited from $600 million laptops-for-schools program

An Indonesian corruption court has sentenced the nation’s former education minister Nadiem Makarim, who is also a hero of the nation’s tech startup scene, to ten years in jail for his role in buying a stack of Chromebooks.

Nadiem is a co-founder of Gojek, a so-called superapp that offers ride share, food delivery, digital payments, and even logistics services. In 2021, Gojek merged with its rival Tokopedia. The combined entity became a ubiquitous part of daily life in Indonesia and other southeast Asian nations.

In 2019, Gojek’s success and prominence saw then-Indonesian-president Joko Widodo ask Nadiem to become Education Minister, with a remit to improve the nation’s schools. Nadiem took the job but kept a minority stake in Gojek during his time in government.

During his time as minister, Nadiem oversaw a $600 million program to acquire laptops for use in schools. Departmental officials compared Chromebooks to Windows laptops and found the latter performed better, because Google’s machines need constant internet access which isn’t available in much of the sprawling Indonesian archipelago.

The Ministry nonetheless decided to order Chromebooks because they are cheaper than Windows machines.

As the laptop program rolled out, observers noted that Google has invested in Gojek, and that the two companies had collaborated on various projects. Some saw that as suggesting a possibility that the decision to acquire Chromebooks might not have been motivated by technical merit and cost factors alone.

Prosecutors eventually decided to pursue a case on the basis that the decision to acquire Chromebooks cost Indonesia over $100 million in avoidable costs.

The matter went to trial and was decided on Tuesday, when a majority of judges found Nadiem guilty of improper conduct as minister – but not of personally profiting from the Chromebook procurement.

The former minister has vowed to appeal and described the judgement as deeply flawed given that the decision to purchase Chromebooks was made at arm’s length and because he did not personally benefit from the program.

Some see the affair as an example of established power brokers in Indonesia flexing their muscle against an emerging bloc of technocratic reformers. That bloc has lost influence since Widodo’s term as President ended. Under that interpretation, prosecuting the Singapore-born, Harvard-educated Nadiem is a significant exercise of old guard power.

Another view is that the affair is so tawdry, it shows Indonesia remains a very difficult nation in which to do business and that if even a local hero can be brought low, foreign tech companies may struggle to make inroads. ®

TikTok has reached a confidential settlement with a Florida teenager who accused the platform of contributing to his mental health problems, removing itself from a jury trial scheduled to begin on July 27 in Los Angeles. The deal, first reported by Bloomberg on Tuesday, makes TikTok the second defendant to exit the case in recent weeks. YouTube settled with the same plaintiff last week.

The plaintiff, a 15-year-old boy identified in court filings by his initials, accuses Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap of designing their platforms to be addictive through features such as infinite scroll and autoplay. He has been using social media since he was eight years old, according to his attorneys. He has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder tied to his social media use, and began seeing therapists in 2023 for those conditions, including suicidal ideation.

With TikTok and YouTube now out, Meta and Snap are the only defendants still facing the jury. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, who was removed from the witness list after Snap settled a previous case, could testify in court for the first time in this trial. Judge Carolyn Kuhl, who presided over the first bellwether, will also oversee this one.

The 💜 of EU tech

The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol’ founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!

The settlement follows a pattern TikTok has now repeated twice. The company also settled the first bellwether case before it went to trial earlier this year, alongside Snap. That first case ended in March with a jury finding Meta and Google liable and awarding six million dollars in damages, the first social media addiction case to reach a verdict.

The platforms are facing thousands of similar complaints. More than 10,000 individual cases and nearly 800 school-district claims are pending in federal multidistrict litigation. The bellwether structure exists because trying them one by one would take decades, so early verdicts and settlements set the terms on which the rest get valued.

The plaintiff’s attorneys said the July case will offer a distinct perspective from the first trial, which centred on a young woman. “The impacts on a male and on somebody who’s a minor currently involve different circumstances and things for the jury to evaluate,” attorney Rahul Ravipudi told NBC News. His legal team plans to call some of the same major witnesses who testified previously, where Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri both took the stand.

The school-district track of the litigation has been moving in the same direction. Snap, YouTube, and TikTok settled one school bellwether before trial, and Meta later settled the Kentucky case that would have been the first school-district trial over youth mental health. Companies that settle disclose nothing, while those that go to trial risk a number on a verdict form that becomes a reference point for every case that follows.

Meta now heads into its second consecutive trial as the company that has most consistently refused to settle. The July 27 trial in Los Angeles will test whether a second jury reaches the same conclusion as the first, and whether two verdicts create enough pressure to change the calculus for the thousands of cases still waiting.

from the no-real-principles-but-self-interest dept

It is zero surprise that the Supreme Court officially overturned its 91-year-old precedent first created in Humphrey’s Executor. That case held that when Congress designates an agency as independent of the executive branch, the president cannot just fire its commissioners. The Humphrey’s Executor opinion stopped FDR from trying to fire an FTC Commissioner he didn’t like, and reinforced the important idea that Congress could design independent agencies, staffed by experts, that should be less prone to partisan political influence.

The Roberts Supreme Court has been signalling it wanted to overturn Humphrey’s for years, and it finally took until the case brought by former FTC Commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya* (unceremoniously fired by Donald Trump for being Democratically appointed) to make it official. In Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court said outright that the president can fire commissioners of government agencies and laughed off the idea that Congress could ever create truly independent agencies.

And yet, on the very same day, the same Court said in Trump v. Cook, that the president cannot fire members of the Board of Governors for the Federal Reserve. In that ruling, the majority makes it clear that of course the Federal Reserve should be seen as wholly independent from the Executive Branch and the president can’t fire its Board members, because that would cause chaos!

Both cases involve the same basic fact patterns — involving whether or not the president can fire board or commissioner members of independent agencies. Both decisions were written by Chief Justice John Roberts. Both seem to take wholly opposite views without even a remote attempt by Roberts to explain how he can say both things (on the same day, no less).

And, as many people are noticing, about the only thing you can say about these two contradictory rulings coming down on the same day is that John Roberts believes in the imperial presidency when it impacts everyone else, but believes in Judicial supremacy when it impacts his retirement funds.

There is no other consistent principle here at all. None. Zero. Zilch.

As Madiba Denne writes in that last Balls & Strikes link:

Throughout Slaughter, Roberts warned that the “unity” of the executive branch would be “destroyed” if presidents could not fire agency officials at will. But in Cook, Roberts was much more worried about the destruction of the stock market. Roberts traced the development of the country’s first banking systems and asserted that the Framers knew “calamities” could arise from “even the suspicion of political manipulation of monetary policy.” The chief recounted at length how President Andrew Jackson opposed a national bank that “he could not control,” and suggested that the president’s meddling directly contributed to “an era of ruinous financial panics.” 

Without an independent central bank, Roberts said, there would be “no way to contain the damage whenever a major institution fell,” “no lender of last resort,” “no elastic currency that could expand to meet demand,” and “no mechanism to ensure that small banks issued loans only within their means.” Roberts concluded that at-will removal would be “corrosive” to the Fed independence that Congress sought to safeguard. The possibility that at-will removal would be similarly corrosive to the independence that Congress sought to safeguard at dozens of other agencies seems not to have crossed his mind.

Advertisement

Roberts ignores that the same reasons the Fed is designed to be independent are why the FTC, FCC, and other agencies were designed to be independent. Congress relied (for basically a century) on the Supreme Court blessing this arrangement to create a variety of independent agencies that lived under the Executive Branch, but were designed purposely by Congress with strong independence in mind.

In the Cook decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh is the one who actually comes close to blurting out the truth, which Roberts carefully avoids. Kavanaugh admits that Slaughter and Cook stand in contrast, but that contrast is okay to him, because Trump fucking up the Federal Reserve would really fuck with monetary policy, and that’s what he really cares about:

I agree with the Court, moreover, that we should not leave open the question whether the Federal Reserve can remain an independent agency in the wake of Slaughter. After Slaughter, there is a clear choice: Either the Federal Reserve may remain independent (with the Governors removable for cause, not at will), or it may not. Leaving that question open would create significant uncertainty about whether the Court might soon eliminate the Federal Reserve’s independence, and thereby expose the Federal Reserve to political influences and jeopardize the efficacy of U. S. monetary policy. Even temporary uncertainty about the status of the Federal Reserve could spark political upheaval, including confusion about whether the President could immediately remove multiple Governors at will, as well as turmoil in the U. S. and world economies.

I would not go down that road. I would not risk destabilizing the U. S. economy just so that we can further mull over an issue that, in various permutations, we have been thinking about for many years.

This is quite the admission, though it’s unclear if Kavanaugh recognizes how astounding it is. He is basically admitting that while Slaughter creates chaos for all sorts of policies — consumer protection, labor relations, financial protection, etc. — that’s all for the little people. As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern notes, the ruling in Slaughter creates a hugely damaging scenario for all sorts of rights:

The impact of this decision is gobsmacking. It strips independence from a vast range of federal agencies, including those that regulate nuclear energy, consumer safety, unions, hazardous chemicals, mine safety, crypto, and large swaths of the economy.

But those policies don’t matter to the Justices like Kavanaugh. Monetary policy, however, impacts his bottom line, and we can’t have that.

Such is also the situation with Roberts. Those other policies don’t impact John Roberts. But a screwy economic system would really put a dent in his various investment funds.

Denne again:

Part of Roberts’s justification for the outcome in Slaughter is democratic accountability—that removal power is necessary for the president to be the one person “with whom the buck stops.” But Roberts was clear, in Cook, that he’s really just concerned about the bucks: Giving Trump unfettered control over most federal agencies could help the rich get richer, and only screw over the little people, but giving Trump control of the Fed could cause an economic crisis big enough to negatively affect Roberts and his rich friends, too. 

Of course, the reality is that this decision isn’t so much about giving the presidency more power, it’s about giving Roberts’ Supreme Court more power. Yes, in the immediate future, this gives Donald Trump, as president, much greater power over the federal government, which will have many dangerous and damaging results.

But does anyone actually believe that the same John Roberts, who blocked former President Obama’s immigration policies or former President Biden’s student loan forgiveness policies, really believes in giving the executive so much power? Of course not. The lesson from John Roberts is clear: when Republicans hold the presidency, they have nearly unlimited power, with the one exception being when Trump threatens to wreck John Roberts’ investment funds. But when a Democrat is president, then suddenly the Supreme Court tut-tuts about how Congress restrains the power of the Executive Branch and it just can’t do anything about it.

The end result is that the power really resides in the ever-consistent view of John Roberts: Republican presidents can do anything they want, so long as it doesn’t harm Roberts’ investments. Democratic presidents are rightly restrained by Congress, and Roberts’ biggest job is swinging that big dial back and forth depending on who is in the White House.

Roberts has spent years whining about how unfair it is that people think his decisions have a political bias. But, really, if he didn’t want that, he maybe shouldn’t have handed down two rulings on the same day that so nakedly confirm exactly what he’s denied.

* Bedoya had to drop out of the case because while he was suing to get his job back, he couldn’t wait around unpaid for the years this case took, and had to go get a real job.

Filed Under: alvaro bedoya, brett kavanaugh, donald trump, executive power, federal reserve, humphrey’s executor, independent agencies, john roberts, lisa cook, rebecca slaughter, supreme court, unitary executive