While both the Truth in Lending Act (TILA) of 1968 and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 were progressive policies designed to provide protections for citizens that were typically outside of mainstream credit markets, their paths to implementation were quite different.  This paper juxtaposes the relatively straightforward process that the Federal Reserve enjoyed in the implementation of the TILA with the incredibly fraught process that it endured during the early stages of implementation of the CRA.  The difference that emerges highlights the importance of the relationship between organizational identity and the mode of governance that a given policy may require.  In particular, this paper argues that a mismatch is likely when a given policy requires that an organization do at least one of two things: either shift governance strategies between optimizing and policing for the same subjects or switch the same governance strategy to a different set of subjects.  The resultant mismatch can lead to crises of organizational identity and policy implementation failure.  While the Truth in Lending Act did not force any a shift on these grounds, the Community Reinvestment Act required much more fundamental changes to how the Federal Reserve operated.  The CRA was designed to enforce notoriously toothless anti-redlining laws passed as a part of the Fair Housing Act from 1968.  The Federal Reserve’s identity as an expertise-laden, quantitatively-driven, politically neutral manager of economic systems contrasted sharply with the CRA’s mandate for the adjudication of conflicting groups within communities all across the country.  The long-held promise of the CRA was one of conflict, not neutrality; intimacy, not impersonality; justice, not efficiency.  In short, the Federal Reserve was tasked with implementing a policy that was diametrically opposed to everything they thought they were as an organization.  The sharp contrast between these strategies of governance presented the Federal Reserve with an existential problem outside of some of the standard narratives of policy implementation failure at the national level such as adversarial politics, regulatory capture, or the rise of neoliberal deregulation.  While these narratives have their place, the role of relationship between organizational identity and the types of governance that a given policy requires has been overlooked.  By leveraging the opportunities that occur when economic and urban sociology can be illuminated by organizational and political theory, this paper seeks to place the subjective aspects of bureaucratic governance at the center of studies of the politics of policy implementation.