News. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) has 30 Democratic cosponsors on a bill that would make it illegal for members of Congress, Hill aides and executive-branch officials to bet on government outcomes on prediction markets.
The legislation is here.
The bill effectively makes it illegal for members of Congress, their aides or administration officials to use prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. The legislation says that it is illegal for that group of people to make prediction bets if they possess “material nonpublic information” about the wager or if they “may reasonably obtain such material non-public information.”
The transactions that are banned include those on government policy, government actions or political outcomes.
Kalshi and Polymarket track a number of wagers of this variety. For example, Kalshi currently offers wagers on whether President Donald Trump will sign an executive order between Jan. 4 and Jan. 10, who the president will name as chair of the Federal Reserve and whether the federal government will be shut down Jan. 31.
But even without this bill, such trades would be illegal because they would amount to insider trading.
This issue is coming to the fore because of a successful trade on Polymarket’s offshore prediction market about the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Tarek Mansour, the founder of Kalshi, said this week that he is supportive of Torres’ bill. Here’s what he said in a LinkedIn post:
