Ex-Trump Official Wants Prediction Markets Regulated By States

Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman and acting chief of staff for the first Trump White House, spoke with Wired Monday (March 2) about his role as head of Gambling Is Not Investing, a group campaigning for prediction markets to be covered by state gambling laws.

“You know the old saying, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck?” he asked. “If it looks like a sports bet, if it sounds like a sports bet, if it pays off like a sports bet, if it’s on a sporting event—it’s a sports bet.”

The prediction market space has become the subject of a heated regulation fight, with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) handling the sector on the federal level.

Traditional sportsbooks give bettors a chance to place a wager on a game’s winner, while prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi let customers purchase an “event contract” on the outcome of the same game.

As Wired notes, critics see little difference between the two, with state regulators around the country going to court against these companies for state gambling law violations.

Platforms argue that they’re federally regulated derivatives under the CFTC, which is now working on clearer “event contract” rules as the category expands. Per the Wired report, Mulvaney sides with the former camp.

“I love the CFTC, but they’re not set up to do this,” he said.

CFTC Chairman Michael Selig has insisted that prediction markets are properly classified, and that his agency has jurisdiction over the sector.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS last week took a closer look at some of the stranger corners of the prediction market world, where customers could bet on things like whether President Donald Trump would drink water during the State of the Union address.

Beyond Polymarket and Kalshi, players now include PredictIt (politics), ForecastEx (via Interactive Brokers), and FanDuel Predicts (with CME). There are also app-based entrants like Robinhood Derivatives and Crypto.com providing event contracts, plus crypto/on-chain newcomers such as Myriad, which offers points and stablecoin markets according to location.

“Prediction markets feel inevitable because they sit at the intersection of three unstoppable trends: the gamification of finance, the financialization of culture, and the internet’s compulsion to keep score,” that report added.