Nevada Rep. Dina Titus, co-chair of the Congressional Gaming Caucus, rallied Tuesday against prediction markets, saying the federal agency overseeing them should stick to regulating sow bellies instead of sports betting and repeated her call for federal legislation to curtail them.
Titus made her remarks Tuesday on the opening day of the 19th Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking held at Bellagio in Las Vegas. The conference hosted by the University of Nevada Las Vegas International Gaming Institute is held every three years and brings together more than 500 researchers, academics, regulators, professional gamblers, and others in the gaming industry from more than 25 countries to discuss wide-ranging topics in gambling studies.
“It used to be that gaming always played defense and kept its head down, hoping the federal government wouldn’t intervene, tax and regulate them,” Titus said. “With the spread of gaming, new technology, and different threats to the industry, gaming can no longer afford to do that.”
Titus brought up the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2018 that struck down a federal law and enabled full-fledged sports betting to spread to 38 states and Washington, D.C. Prediction markets operating outside state regulation were never authorized by Congress or by the court decision, she said.
“States have set up licensing requirements and anti-money-laundering protocols, age verification, and responsible gaming,” Titus said. “But these new efforts to get around all that don’t call for those types of protections. They call themselves sports events contacts, but if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s sports betting.”
Titus has introduced the Fair Markets and Sports Integrity Act aimed to prevent prediction market platforms, such as Kalshi and Polymarket, from offering financial contracts tied to outcomes of sports and casino-style games without state licenses. The prediction markets that have proliferated over the past year claim their authority under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to the chagrin of states and tribal operators.
“This isn’t trying to stifle innovation or stop competition,” Titus said. “It’s simply that if you want to offer sports betting or any kind of casino betting, there has to be a level playing field. You have to abide by the rules of the jurisdictions – states or tribes.”
Titus questioned how the CFTC, the independent federal agency that’s “known for regulating sow bellies” has the ability to regulate gaming.
“They’ve already said they aren’t a gaming regulator, and they certainly don’t have the resources or the expertise. Yet they’re very aggressive in filing lawsuits (against states) on behalf of prediction markets and cozying up to (President Trump’s son Donald Jr. who works with the companies),” Titus said. “How that works out in the courts and with legislation is yet to be determined. Alot of people are jumping on that bandwagon.”
Titus also talked about another bill introduced to prevent members of Congress from profiting off insider trading. In addition, she said sports betting integrity monitoring to prevent scandals doesn’t operate in the unregulated world and would fail to spot unusual patterns, unlike legal sportsbooks.
Other gambling-industry legislation is making its way through Congress, including the Fair Bet Act. It would restore the full deduction on gambling losses, which were reduced from 100% of losses to 90%. There’s also a bill to raise the slot tax threshold to $5,000 after recently getting increased to $2,500. “We need it to go to $5,000 and index it to inflation, so it can keep up,” Titus said. “It hasn’t changed in years.”
Finally, she brought up the Discriminatory Gaming Tax Repeal Act that would repeal the excise tax on sports wagering of 0.25%. Titus said the Treasury Department doesn’t even know where that revenue goes and what it’s used for. “If it’s not significant to them, let’s take it back. We either don’t need the tax or we can return it to the jurisdiction that generated it.”
Titus reiterated that Nevada is the gold standard for regulation and has spread that knowledge to other states.
“We’ve always depended on public confidence, and people know that the games they are playing are fair and that operators are accountable and consumers protected and the integrity of competition is preserved,” Titus said. “That’s why conferences like this are so important because what you bring to the discussion is critical to maintaining those types of things, especially as gaming evolves with all the new technology. Having you all here to work with policy makers and researchers and operators, members of the industry and consumers, you all have a part.”
