Mick Mulvaney wants to clarify: He really likes gambling. “You’re talking to the only former member of Congress who has won a poker tournament in Las Vegas,” he told WIRED. When he was representing South Carolina in the U.S. House of Representatives, he pressured the state to allow sports betting.
Because of his background, Mulvaney, a former Trump administration official, says he can tell when something is gambling — and sports contracts on prediction markets fit the bill. “You know the old saying, 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 feels like a sports bet, if it pays like a sports bet, if it’s on a sporting event – it’s a sports bet.”
Mulvaney, who was President Trump’s acting White House Chief of Staff from 2019 to 2020, is now leading a new advocacy coalition called Gambling Is Not Investing, which will lobby to have prediction markets regulated by state gambling laws. He joins several other prominent Republicans in calling for similar rules. Earlier this month, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and current Utah Governor Spencer Cox both spoke out against the current federal approach to regulating prediction markets. (Christie also used the line “quack like a duck”.)
The developments 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 a traditional sportsbook will offer customers the chance to bet on which team will win or lose the game, a prediction market will offer an “event contract” on the outcome. Critics consider this difference to be little more than a loophole, and state officials across the country are currently pursuing lawsuits against prediction market companies like Kalshi, alleging that they violate state gambling laws. (Although these markets offer event contracts on a variety of topics, sporting events are their most popular offerings.) “I like the CFTC, but they’re not willing to do this,” says Mulvaney.
Recently, a group of 23 Democratic senators sent a letter to the CFTC urging it to allow these court cases to proceed. It didn’t seem to be going well; CFTC head Michael Selig insists that prediction markets are classified correctly, and that his agency has jurisdiction over the industry. After Selig released a video promising to take “those who challenge our authority” to court, the CFTC also took the unprecedented step of filing a brief in support of cryptocurrency platform Crypto.com, which is facing a lawsuit from Nevada regulators over its prediction market offering.
During the Biden administration, the CFTC took a notably different approach to prediction markets, even fining PolyMarket $1.4 million for failing to register as a derivatives market and temporarily barring it from operating in the US.
However, the agency’s friendlier approach now appears to coincide with the White House’s interest in the industry. Trump has many ties to the world of prediction markets. Truth Social, the social media platform majority-owned by President Trump and his family, is planning its own prediction market 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 Gambling Not Investing shows that there is a growing wing of the Republican Party that feels prediction markets need more guardrails. Its founding member organizations include several conservative consumer advocacy groups, including Moms for America, Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, and Frontiers of Freedom.
Mulvaney hopes he can make his case in the current White House. “Their default position is to regulate less, not more. And I respect that,” he says. “But I also know that earlier in the Trump administration, when there were common sense reasons to do some regulation, we did that.”
