The steel was one element in an article published Tuesday in The New York Times that amounted to a virtual atlas of the uses to which the agency has been put in service of Mr. Christie’s machine: patronage appointments, raids on bridge and tunnel tolls to keep taxes down in New Jersey, a new PATH station for a town led by the first Democratic mayor to endorse Mr. Christie for election.

Throughout his quick rise in New Jersey politics over the last decade, Mr. Christie has been uninhibited in deploying the tools of whatever office he was serving in to political ends.

As the chief federal prosecutor in the state, he could and did bop subpoenas on the heads of political foes at the height of election campaigns, conveniently tarring them as being “under investigation.” When Mr. Christie was governor, grant money available after Hurricane Sandy was awarded to favored projects that were far from the coast, and held back from towns that were all but drowned by the storm but had been unaccommodating to the needs of his pals.

And then there are the George Washington Bridge traffic jams of last September, engineered directly by one of his senior aides and his appointees at the Port Authority, apparently in retribution for a local mayor’s failure to endorse the governor.

For political friends, it was World Trade Center memorabilia and Hurricane Sandy grants; for enemies, it was subpoenas and traffic jams.