@mmasnick @kathryntewson You joke but this is basically how a lot of government agencies do it.
True story, I sued the State Department for not following their own reg and doing something obnoxious and discriminatory that the reg prohibited, and their response was to change the reg in the middle of litigation to allow the obnoxious and discriminatory thing they'd been doing.
tl;dr they had a good reg, they didn't follow it, they got sued, they made it a bad reg.