White House eyes CFTC proposal for regulating prediction markets

A proposal for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to regulate prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket is under review by the White House, a filing from Tuesday shows.

Details of the proposal, which are being reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget, are not visible on the filing.

CNBC has requested comment from the CFTC, Kalshi and Polymarket on the filing, which Bloomberg reported earlier Wednesday.

CFTC Chairman Michael Selig on Jan. 29 said the agency planned to write rules for governing prediction markets as he scrapped a proposed rule that would have prohibited trades on sports and politics on those platforms.

The agency has argued in public statements and in courts that it has exclusive authority to regulate the growing prediction market sector, rather than individual states, some of which are seeking to exercise such authority.

Tuesday’s filing came on the same day that President Donald Trump, in a social media post, said, “It is critically important that the CFTC’s exclusive authority over Prediction Markets is maintained, and that they will thrive.”

“Under my leadership, we are setting ‘rules of the road’ that are the Gold Standard for the States. We cannot have SCUM like Chris Christie, Letitia James, Tim Walz, and JB Pritzker setting the rules!” Trump wrote. “Other Countries are after this new form of Financial Market, and we want to remain at the top,” he wrote.

All of those named elected officials have been targets of Trump’s vitriol for other reasons previously as well.

Christie, a former New Jersey governor, is a strategic advisor to the American Gaming Association, which opposes prediction markets being allowed to offer contracts on sporting event outcomes.

Prediction markets “are clearly illegal in the sports gaming space,” Christie told CNBC’s Contessa Brewer in an interview in December 2025.

He said it is up to individual states to determine whether to allow sports betting on authorized platforms and to regulate their business.

James, who is New York’s attorney general, in April sued Coinbase and Gemini, for what her office said was “illegally running gambling operations in New York through their so-called ‘prediction market’ platforms.” She is also part of a consortium of state attorneys general supporting Massachusetts’ lawsuit against Kalshi for offering sports contracts to its residents in alleged violation of state gambling laws.

Walz, the governor of Minnesota, last week signed the nation’s first ban of prediction markets by an individual state. Illinois Gov. Pritzker, in April, signed an executive order banning state officials and employees from wagering on prediction markets with confidential information.

On Sunday, The New York Times published an article with the headline “How Prediction Markets and Crypto Firms Steamrolled a Watchdog Agency,” about the CFTC.

The article detailed how,…