Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg hopes the federal government will follow California's lead in approving a regulation that will ban the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles.

"It's interesting to see how the states are trying to go above and beyond what we're doing at the federal level," Buttigieg said in a podcast interview with KTTV-TV in Los Angeles, the Western Journal reported.

Buttigieg said he's "really interested to follow these developments, while we continue to set a national policy that's the baseline for all of this."