An Arizona state lawmaker is moonlighting as a lobbyist.
Or is he a lobbyist moonlighting as a lawmaker?
Either way, Republican Rep. Matt Gress doesn’t really like talking about it.
Gress represents Legislative District 4, a politically competitive district that covers north central Phoenix, roughly north of Camelback Road from State Route 51 to the 101 freeway.
He’s also a registered lobbyist in New Hampshire, Iowa, Indiana and Arkansas for a political organization based in Oklahoma, according to documents from those states.
But he’s not a registered lobbyist in Arizona … anymore.
It begs the question: When he’s pushing legislation, how do you know if he’s working for his constituents or his lobbying clients?1
Gress lobbies for Americans for Fair Treatment, a national nonprofit dedicated to “workers’ rights” — in other words, supporting legislation that impedes union operations and discourages people from joining unions.
Gress’ profile on the Americans for Fair Treatment website, and his lobbyist registration paperwork in four states.
If that rings a bell, it’s because it sounds a lot like Gress’ own legislative agenda.
For example, earlier this year, Gress used his position as the chairman of the House Education Committee to pass a strike-everything amendment to HCR2040 that would ban school districts from deducting union dues from employees’ paychecks, among other union-busting provisions.2
Oddly enough, that exact policy is a huge priority for his employer, Americans for Fair Treatment, as the organization laid out in a blog post last month.
And in response to teachers using sick time to protest ICE earlier this year, Gress sponsored legislation to block public and charter school teachers from participating in “organized work stoppages.” His bill contained some pretty harsh penalties.
“A teacher who violates this subsection forfeits all civil service rights, all reemployment rights and any other rights, benefits or privileges that accrue as a result of employment,” the bill states.
Despite the fact that a lawmaker simultaneously working as a lobbyist might raise some ethical questions, Gress was unapologetic when we asked him about his out-of-state lobbying activities.
“I follow all the laws in the other states,” he said. “I have my First Amendment rights to support policies that I believe will benefit workers and talk to other people across the country about that, and I don’t see any conflict.”
We asked him if he has told his colleagues at the Legislature that he’s a lobbyist in other states. He said he hadn’t.
But “it’s publicly available on my financial disclosure form,” he said.
However, his financial disclosure form doesn’t exactly explain he’s a registered lobbyist in four states. It says only that he works for Americans for Fair Treatment and “offers educational materials and a free membership program to current and former public-sector employees” on the organization’s behalf.
To be clear, Arizona law bars legislators from working as lobbyists in Arizona, but it doesn’t bar them from lobbying in other states. Meaning there’s nothing illegal about what Gress is doing.
And when we went through those financial disclosure forms, we found quite a few Arizona lawmakers with side gigs as “consultants.” Not quite lobbying, but close.
Still, making the leap from lobbyist to lawmaker is controversial, even among his fellow Republicans.
Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman tried to block lobbyists from becoming lawmakers or statewide officials last year. His legislation would have asked voters to decide if lobbyists would have to wait one year before they could run for the Legislature. (The reverse is already true — lawmakers have to wait a year before they can become lobbyists.)
If it had been retroactive, that bill would have covered Gress, considering he was a registered lobbyist in Arizona — first for the Arizona Corporation Commission, then for the Governor’s Office under Doug Ducey — from 2016 until January 1, 2023.
He took office as a state representative eight days after canceling his registration as a lobbyist.
Gress has an official role at Americans for Fair Treatment as vice president of government affairs, and he registered as a lobbyist in all four non-Arizona states late last fall.
And it’s worth noting that all four of those states’ legislatures meet during the same time as the Arizona Legislature — roughly January to June — raising questions about how, exactly, he’s lobbying lawmakers in those states.
And it’s not just teachers’ unions that Americans for Fair Treatment goes after. It has supported legislation in other states targeting TSA workers, police, firefighters and other public employees.
The group is influential enough in the “workers’ rights” movement that former AFFT CEO Elisabeth Messenger was one of President Donald Trump’s picks to head the federal government’s Office of Labor-Management Standards.
Throughout his tenure as a representative, Gress has supported other anti-teacher’s union bills — or as Gress called them, “pro-worker bills.”
“We’ve had pro-worker bills that have come through the Legislature this session that I’ve supported and every other session … But I have not done any work on behalf of AFFT here at the Legislature — I think that would be inappropriate,” he told us.
Gress still maintains union support in Arizona — just not from teacher’s unions, of course.
The Phoenix Law Enforcement Association endorsed Gress in 2024. He has also touted his endorsements by the Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona and the Arizona State Troopers Association. (The Arizona Police Association and the Boilermakers 627 PAC donated marginal amounts of money to Gress’ 2026 campaign.)
While Gress maintains he hasn’t crossed the line into lobbying in Arizona, he got a little prickly when we pressed him about his lobbying endeavors.
“This is the extent to which I’m having a conversation with you on it. I don’t believe I have anything else to add,” he said.
If we have any follow-up questions?
“There won’t be any follow-up answers,” Gress said.
Not a bad turn of phrase, we gotta admit.
But hey, he wouldn’t be much of a lobbyist if he didn’t have a silver tongue.
As far as we know, Gress is the only Arizona lawmaker who’s also a registered lobbyist.
But that doesn’t mean he’s the only one doing lobbying-adjacent work.
In fact, several current lawmakers hold consulting jobs with political groups, advising on policy or strategy that can shape government decisions, even as they serve in government themselves.
Last month, we broke the story that Democratic Sen. Brian Fernandez served as a vice president of government relations for a Yuma hospital system while also using his job as a lawmaker to help secure state funding for that hospital system.
Several other lawmakers also report consulting or advisory roles in their latest financial disclosure statements.
House Speaker Steve Montenegro consults for Vet2Gov, a veterans group that encourages former service members to run for public office. He also owns a business called “Coronam Consulting.”
Democratic Rep. Brian Garcia consults for Tides Advocacy, a social-justice advocacy group, and works for All Voting Is Local, a voting-rights organization that regularly lobbies the Legislature.
And Republican Sen. JD Mesnard does consulting and government-relations work for Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal-defense fund.
Click the image to see the full table.
We found 18 current Arizona lawmakers who listed consultant or consultant-like roles on their latest financial disclosure statements.
Some, like Democratic Rep. Seth Blattman’s “management consultant” role for furniture companies, don’t appear to be related to any government relations.
Others are more blatantly political, such as Republican Sen. Jake Hoffman’s Rally Forge LLC business, a marketing firm that got banned from Facebook for running a conservative troll farm.
Just claim victory: Turning Point USA’s candidates for the Salt River Project fell mostly flat despite massively outspending the “Clean Energy Team,” the Republic’s Laura Gersony reports. Last night’s results gave the board a pro-clean energy majority for the first time ever. But that hasn’t stopped the Turning Point crowd from claiming victory, saying the clean team doesn’t “have total control of SRP as they had hoped.”
Ground zero for hunger: 400,000 Arizonans were dropped from food stamps since President Donald Trump’s budget cut funding and created more bureaucratic red tape for the program, Nicole Santa Cruz reports for ProPublica. That is, simply put, a stunning drop. Nearly half (47%) of all people who were covered by Arizona’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) just a year ago no longer receive the help — by far the largest proportional drop in the nation. The second largest loss was in Florida, where 16% of recipients lost their benefit, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Oh, he might be cooked: After we reported that Neil DeSanti, a far-right GOP House candidate in North Phoenix, still has not had his rights restored over a felony burglary conviction, the Arizona Mirror’s Jim Small followed up with the answer to a question that had been bugging us: Doesn’t anyone care that this guy is (allegedly) breaking the law? The Attorney General’s Office finally confirmed that it started an investigation into DeSanti after Small wrote about his last campaign in 2024, and says that after almost two years, the investigation is coming close to wrapping up. It’s possible DeSanti may have a lot more felonies on his record by the time that’s all said and done. He has voted in at least 16 elections since he registered in 2012. He also said that he owned guns — something you can’t do unless your rights have been restored.
“I must have them restored, because I can vote and possess a firearm,” he told the Mirror back in 2024. “I’ve voted numerous times.”
Not your Senate: The social justice organizing group Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA) is suing Republican Senate President Warren Petersen and Speaker Steve Montenegro for banning several of its members from the Arizona Senate for the rest of the legislative session, the Phoenix New Times’ Zach Buchanan reports. As we noted in our coverage of the incident in February, Senate security officials handed several people generic slips of paper — which don’t list the names of those who were trespassed, don’t have any letterhead and don’t look terribly legit. There is no indication that the building’s security has a list of people they trespassed for a chanting outburst during a committee hearing the day before, and LUCHA is claiming violations of the First and 14th Amendments.
Fun fact: Most of the Arizona Agenda staff has been kicked out of the state House at one point or another.
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Adios, Steve: Former Maricopa County Superintendent of Schools Steve Watson abruptly quit his gig as acting superintendent of the Cartwright Elementary School District last night. He held the job for just over a year, and had aligned himself with the troubled trio of Democratic Rep. Lydia Hernandez, her daughter Cassandra Hernandez and former lawmaker Rosa Cantu, who is running for the Legislature again this year but faces a challenge to her signatures.
GOP Attorney General candidate Rodney Glassman announced he has a plan to solve the problem that’s on the forefront of all Arizona voters’ minds.
That’s right: the rash of “online videos of someone being pushed onto subway tracks by a thug who shouldn’t be on the streets.”
He even developed a four-point plan to stop this kind of rampant thuggery, including overruling local sentencing decisions and working more closely with ICE, as he explained in an email titled “How I’d stop subway track killers.”
We better get to work building a subway somewhere in Arizona so he can solve this pressing issue.
1 And it raises some other odd questions: When Gress buys himself lunch, does he have to report it?
2 While the amendment carries Gress’ name as the chairman of the House Education Committee, it’s technically sponsored by Republican Rep. Justin Olson.