Mick Mulvaney wants to be clear: he really likes gambling. “You’re talking to the only former member of Congress to win a poker tournament in Las Vegas,” he tells WIRED. When he represented South Carolina in the U.S. House of Representatives, he pushed for the state to allow sports betting.
Mulvaney, a former Trump administration official, claims because of his background that he can tell when something is gambling, and that sports contracts in prediction markets meet that requirement. “You know the old saying that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck?” he asks. “If it looks like a sports bet, if it sounds like a sports bet, if it pays like a sports bet, if it’s about a sporting event, it’s a sports bet.”
Mulvaney, who served as President Trump’s acting White House chief of staff from 2019 to 2020, is now leading a fresh coalition called Gambling Is Not Investing that will lobby for state gambling laws to regulate prediction markets. He joins a number of other prominent Republicans calling for similar policies. Earlier this month, former Fresh Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and current Utah Gov. Spencer Cox spoke out against the current federal approach to regulating prediction markets. (Christie also used the term “quack like a duck” line.)
These changes are part of a fierce political battle over how prediction markets are regulated. At the federal level, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) oversees these platforms, which are currently classified as derivatives markets. While conventional sports betting offers customers the opportunity to place a bet on which team will win or lose a match, the prediction market offers a “per-event contract” on the outcome. Critics see this difference as merely a legal loophole, and state governments across the country are currently filing lawsuits against prediction market companies like Kalshi, alleging they violate state gambling laws. (Though these markets offer contracts for a variety of events, the most popular offering is sports.) “I love the CFTC, but they’re not prepared for this,” Mulvaney says.
Recently, a group of 23 Democratic senators sent a letter to the CFTC urging it to leave the lawsuits unresolved. It didn’t look like everything was going to end well; CFTC chief Michael Selig insists that prediction markets are properly classified and that his agency has jurisdiction over the industry. After Selig posted a video in which he promised to meet with those who “question our authority” in court, the CFTC even took the unprecedented step of filing to support cryptocurrency platform Crypto.com, which is facing a lawsuit from Nevada regulators over its prediction market offering.
During the Biden administration, the CFTC made a decision especially different approach into prediction markets, even fining Polymarket $1.4 million for failing to register as a derivatives market and temporarily blocking it from operating in the US.
Now, however, the agency’s more genial approach seems to coincide with the White House’s interest in this industry. The Trumps have numerous ties to the world of forecasting. Truth Social, the social media platform majority-owned by President Trump and his family, is planning its own prediction marketplace offering, reportedly called Truth Predict. Donald Trump Jr is an advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket, and his venture capital firm has invested in the latter.
But the launch of the Gambling Not Investing program shows there is a growing wing of the Republican Party that believes prediction markets need more guardrails. Its founding member organizations include a number of conservative consumer groups, including Moms for America, Consumer Action for a Mighty Economy and Frontiers of Freedom.
Mulvaney hopes to make his case to the current White House. “Their default position will be less regulation, not more. And I respect that,” he says. “But I also know that during the first Trump administration, when there were common-sense reasons to make some regulations, we did it.”