A general-looking administrative order can be drafted to target one named official

Evidence

The order obviously applied to Triborough and to Moses. (By coincidence, it also applied to another New York City official, Tenement House Commissioner Langdon W. Post, who was a member of the Municipal Housing Authority, which was also receiving federal funds, but Ickes privately assured La Guardia that the order would not be enforced in Post’s case. Post stayed out of the controversy because he was away on an ocean cruise.) It had almost the full force of law. It had the full force of an official regulation of the agency financing Triborough—and, Ickes told La Guardia, it embodied in those official regulations what he had previously said privately: that no more money would be given to Triborough until Moses was off the Triborough board. Most important, it gave La Guardia a public excuse for ousting Moses: an official PWA rule forbade Moses to serve. Its issuance was the move of a fox. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 1885

Categorization

• DEFINE: flagged by the selector, no supporting note recorded
• XREF: Connects to my interest in institutions and extralegal power — how formal rules are written to serve private vendettas, echoing Milgrom’s and Bernstein’s analyses of how institutions encode informal agendas.
• SEED: Essay angle: how targeting rules — facially neutral regulations with one intended victim and secretly promised exemptions for everyone else — recur across politics and bureaucracy.