Twelve years ago I went to work as a branch chief for the Arizona Game & Fish Department. In Arizona, like in most states, wildlife conservation is wholly funded by people who hunt and fish. And nationwide, hunting and fishing has been in decline for decades.

Though we were a government agency, we were funded like a business. We received no money from the state budget—our customers funded the entire operation. The Department engaged in marketing and educational efforts to try and create more hunters and anglers, but we also needed to raise our license fees.

So, as a government agency, we did what we needed to do to raise our prices:

We pushed for years to get legislation passed that would allow the Department to increase fees. Once the legislation passed, we entered the rule making process—an arcane and overlooked part of lawmaking that happens at the state and federal level. During rule making (the part of the process I managed), we traveled to something like nine different cities in Arizona to get public input.

(Side note: On one of these trips I learned the hard way that there are no bathrooms on a six-passenger, government owned plane—let alone the gold plated toilets the Trump family is used to.)



After traveling to these nine cities and gathering public input, we put together a final rule making package, which was then approved by the gubernatorially appointed Game & Fish Commission, which was made final when it was approved by a special council in the Governor's office that approved rules for all agencies.

We needed to increase our prices. Our customers supported that price increase. To raise those prices we had to engage in a years-long process, making compromises the entire way.

That's just how government works—except, in this case we were deciding how much the residents of one state should have to pay to shoot and eat squirrels (I learned when I joined the Department that squirrel hunting is a real thing). We weren't trying to repeal the 2,700 pages of Obamacare.

In the public sector, you can't pull a Tim Cook and simply say, "Cut the cord off those ear buds, make them easier to lose, and charge people $200 for it."

The public sector is designed to move slowly, and it's an environment former private sector candidates and appointees have struggled with.