It is essential to “claw back that heavy hand of government,” Steve Montenegro, speaker of the Arizona State House of Representatives, said during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday, discussing state-level Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) efforts and more.

Montenegro explained that his state is absolutely looking for ways to pinpoint and cut fraud, waste, and abuse, as are many other states across the country.

“For years, we’ve had a committee like on regulatory affairs. This year, we have a committee specifically that they’ve dubbed it the Arizona State DOGE committee of its own regulatory oversight… Let’s dig into the agencies. Let’s keep the executive accountable and the agencies accountable with all of the mandates that they pass, or the rules that they pass, not only on clawing back — not only on us, clawing back on all this regulation, we want to make sure we have an environment where Arizona can prosper,” he explained, adding they want a state where the “heavy hand of government isn’t suffocating and strangling innovators, mom and pop shops, and thinkers that want to go out and produce.”

“And so we’ve tasked that committee with helping us do that. And yes, where we need to find where these agencies are misspending money, miscalculating, having programs and things that they shouldn’t,” he said, noting that they want to help the vulnerable, but there is too much “waste, fraud, and abuse that prevents even that from happening.”

“So we have to claw back that heavy hand of government, and we…  want to make sure that people know in Arizona we’re not going to play around — even if there is a Democrat governor… we have the purse strings that as a legislature we can use, and it’s hard time to do it. So we’re committed to doing that,” he said, also discussing another big effort of his state: A constitutional amendment that would end DEI based racial discrimination, noting that the swamp has “found some ways to bypass and to go around the system.”

LISTEN:

“We’re just going to clean this up in Arizona, because discrimination is never ok. Let’s put it that way, you shouldn’t have either a leg up or you shouldn’t be discriminated against because of your ethnicity or the color of your skin, your background. So we’re serious about this. We’re going to continue to work with President Trump administration on issues of DEI, on issues of the border, work together with Tom Homan, who is a good friend,” he added.

Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.