The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s proposal to regulate speculative markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket is being reviewed by the White House, a filing on Tuesday showed.
Details of the proposal, which is being reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget, do not appear on file.
CNBC requested comment from the CFTC, Kalshi and Polymarket on the filing, which Bloomberg reported earlier Wednesday.
CFTC Chairman Michael Selig on Jan. 29 said that the organization plans to write rules to manage prediction markets as it rejects a proposed law that would prevent the exchange of sports and politics on those platforms.
The headquarters of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington, Dec. 23, 2022.
Ting Shen | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The agency has argued in public statements and in court that it has exclusive authority to regulate the burgeoning speculation market sector, rather than individual states, some of which want to exercise such authority.
Tuesday’s filing came on the same day that President Donald Trump, in a social media post, said, “It is very important that the CFTC’s exclusive authority over the futures markets be preserved, and they will succeed.”
“Under my leadership, we are setting the Gold Standard ‘rules of the road’ 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 following this new type of Financial Market, and we want to stay on top,” he wrote.
All of those elected officials have been targets of Trump’s vitriol for other reasons before.
Christie, a former governor of New Jersey, is a strategic advisor to the American Gaming Association, which opposes the betting markets being allowed to offer contracts on the results of sporting events.
Prediction markets are “clearly illegal in the sports betting arena,” Christie told CNBC’s Contessa Brewer in a December 2025 interview.
He said it is up to each county to decide whether to allow sports betting at licensed venues and regulate their business.
James, who is New York’s attorney general, in April sued Coinbase and Gemini, for what his office said was “running illegal gambling operations in New York through their so-called ‘prediction market’ platforms.” He is also part of a consortium of state attorneys general who supported a Massachusetts lawsuit against Kalshi for awarding sports contracts to its residents for allegedly violating the state’s gambling laws.
Walz, the governor of Minnesota, last week signed the country’s first ban on prediction markets by an individual state. Illinois Gov. Pritzker, in April, signed an executive order barring government officials and employees from betting on prediction markets with confidential information.
On Sunday, the New York Times published an article titled “How Prediction Markets and Crypto Companies Steamrolled the Watchdog Agency,” about the CFTC.
The article elaborated, “Three companies — each with ties to the Trump family’s business empire — need the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to bless their ambitions in the hot field of futures markets.” The firms The New York Times mentioned are Crypto.com, Polymarket and Gemini Titan, an offshoot of Gemini.
The article said that despite the concerns of top CFTC officials about various problems related to those companies, “Caroline D. Pham, the commission’s chairwoman at the time, and her chief counsel stepped in to help the firms get what they wanted, according to people familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared repercussions.
CNBC has asked the CFTC for comment on this article.
Gary Gensler, former chairman of the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission, told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Wednesday that despite the CFTC’s current claims, the agency is not authorized under the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 to regulate futures markets.
Gensler said states, not the CFTC, should regulate those markets.
“Congress can fix that if they want to change it, but I can say that I don’t think the CFTC then in 2010, or now in 2026, … has the power” to oversee the prediction markets, he said. “It’s a smaller institution now than it was 15 years ago, and the capital markets have grown a lot.”
In this photo illustration, Applications of online betting market sites are shown on an electronic device on Feb. 25, 2026 in Chicago, Illinois.
Scott Olson | Getty Images
“And, my lord, is it going to be … regulating sports contracts, a sports betting contract on whether a certain basketball player gets a three-point play in the third quarter or not? I don’t think that’s his expertise.”
“Its technology is good, but it’s small and targets public safety risks in agricultural products, energy products and fertility products,” Gensler said.
He predicted that the dispute over whether the CFTC or individual states have the power to regulate the futures markets will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court.
Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and a small investment.
