Kalshi’s profit margins depend on keeping Washington on its good side. It’s spending big in D.C. to make that happen as the prediction market company manages regulatory threats, potential legislative action and public relations challenges.
Kalshi now has over two-dozen federal lobbyists working on its behalf. Almost all of them have congressional bona fides, including a pair of one-time legislative directors under Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and a handful of former chiefs of staff and senior counsels to other lawmakers.
Former Sen. Blanche Lincoln herself is on Kalshi’s influence team. And the company recently brought on Tony Hanagan, a well-liked and well-connected longtime Republican cloakroom staffer, as its head of congressional affairs.
Kalshi, which currently lets prognosticators in every state put money on the odds of the outcomes of all sorts of future events, including politics, even hired a former communications director for Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) — an arch-critic of prediction markets — to lobby government officials.
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“Kalshi is leading the push for bipartisan legislation that protects consumers, keeps minors off our platform, and makes insider trading bans standard across the industry,” John Bivona, Kalshi’s head of federal government relations, told NOTUS in a statement. “We’ve worked with dozens of lawmakers from both parties on these priorities, and we welcome partnering with anyone serious about responsible regulation.”
It’s message the company has worked to spread across D.C., often by plastering it across the district’s buildings and Metro stops.
Lawmakers of both parties and chambers have together introduced more than two-dozen bills this year alone that aim to put guardrails on prediction markets.
But while senators have barred themselves from prediction market trading, and the House has banned trades over congressional Wi-Fi, neither chamber has passed any meaningful legislation curtailing what kind of bets prediction markets may offer or who can use the markets.
“The challenge going forward is … organizations like this make massive amounts of money,” Merkley told NOTUS. “Billions of dollars have flowed through this expansive casino. They’re going to spend massive sums on lobbyists and media campaigns and so forth to try to make sure it doesn’t get shut down. And they have the support of the president.”
Kalshi has expressed support for one congressional bill — the Prediction Market Act of 2026 — that would bar the president and members of Congress from placing trades. It’s also blessed Rep. Josh Gottheimer’s bill to keep children off prediction market platforms.
“I give Kalshi credit for supporting the legislation instead of ducking the issue,” Gottheimer, a Democrat from New Jersey, said in a statement.
But even these bills supported by Kalshi remain in limbo with fewer than four months remaining in the current Congress.
Event contracts — a bet on the real-world outcome of an upcoming occurrence — have long had real-world uses, such as when farmers use them as a hedge to minimize potential losses.
But in just a few short years, prediction market sites such as Kalshi and Polymarket, a rival platform that largely operates overseas, have made betting a frictionless experience for any American with an internet connection. Some lawmakers of both parties view this as a loophole to allow for national online gambling.
“That’s all it is,” said Rep. Blake Moore, a Republican from Utah, a state whose constitution outlaws gambling and whose governor is fighting to bar companies like Kalshi from operating within its borders. “They have manipulated the concept of what a prediction market was, what it was intended for as a financial tool for centuries, and they have made this into very quick, simple, easy online gambling, mostly sports online gambling.”
Kalshi has long maintained the swaps it offers are legally distinct from gambling.
“It’s flat-out wrong to say that Kalshi is ‘indistinguishable from traditional sports betting,’” the company has said. “It’s unprecedented and overly aggressive for states to try to shut down a federally licensed exchange. It’s like if North Carolina wanted to shut down the stock market.”
Many in Congress aren’t buying it.
“They’re creating opportunities for people to bet on an event that people don’t know the outcome to,” Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) said. “That’s gambling, isn’t it?”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco took that same view last week when it ruled that the states can regulate prediction market platforms as a form of gambling. The ruling contradicted the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals’ prior finding in favor of Kalshi’s view.
“Fortunately, they are losing in their lawsuits to stop states from reining them in or shutting them down,” said Democrat Sen. Richard Blumenthal. His state, Connecticut, is one of 20 that have sued to regulate prediction markets. The Supreme Court is likely to decide their ultimate success or failure.
Blumenthal and Sen. Katie Britt (R-Alabama) introduced a bill to bar social media sites from advertising prediction markets to minors, one of several bills in the space that have garnered some support across party lines.
“Regardless of how you feel about prediction markets, it’s clear that underage use of these prediction markets can pose the same risk as underage gambling,” Britt said. “It’s now time for us to tell the social media companies and to tell bad actors in the gaming space and those that are intentionally targeting underage individuals that they’re off limits.”
Kalshi’s slogan is “Trade on anything,” whether that be the winner of this season of “America’s Got Talent” or the timing of a U.S.-Iran nuclear deal. Wagering on anything has proven to be lucrative. Kalshi was valued at $22 billion in a March fundraising round and has partnered with major sports teams and media companies.
A bill introduced in the House by Moore would disallow platforms from offering “event contracts based on those really troublesome areas, from terrorism to assassinations, war, gaming, illegal activity.”
“Betting on who wins the opening coin toss of a football game is one thing, and it’s stupid,” Moore said. “But when we’re betting on these types of things, about the scope of a wildfire, we should pause as a society.”
Kalshi was not one of the multiple platforms that offered bets related to the Palisades fires in 2025. (The platform does host a subpage where users can place bets on the timing and intensity of various natural disasters.)
For some lawmakers, the fires marked their first experience with prediction markets — one that angered them. Further reports of political candidates’ insider trading have only deepened their animosity toward the platforms.
Other lawmakers have taken a different tack, seeking to limit who can participate in prediction markets.
Democratic Reps. Nikki Budzinski of Illinois and Eugene Vindman of Virginia separately introduced bills to keep certain federal officials, such as lawmakers and members of the military, from making trades.
“It’s very narrowly focused,” Budzinski said in an interview. “It is the only bipartisan House bill that’s out there right now that would basically say that if you’re in public service, someone like myself that has, because of the nature of my position, information that is sensitive government information, that I shouldn’t be monetizing that through the prediction market space.”
Others are gunning for the industry’s throat, casting prediction markets’ very existence as an existential threat to Democracy.
“When the American people go to vote, we all are in effect inhabiting a public office,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) said. “So we don’t want people betting on elections and then selling their votes or renting their votes for the purposes of winning their bet.”
Raskin’s bill would prevent trading on elections, “government actions,” pending court decisions and sports — effectively eliminating the vast majority of markets offered by Kalshi and no doubt cratering its multibillion-dollar valuation. Merkley introduced the bill’s Senate counterpart.
“Betting on public elections, betting on the outcome of legislation and betting on the outcome of judicial decisions would all fundamentally undermine and ultimately destroy the integrity of constitutional government,” Raskin continued.
Kalshi is quick to remind that it’s regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which, under President Donald Trump, bills itself as the sole entity with authority over prediction markets. It’s gone so far as to sue some of the states that have tried to impose their own regulations.
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., has worked as a paid adviser to Kalshi and is an investor in Polymarket, which received prime placement on the railing of the UFC ring constructed on the White House lawn — even as the White House has taken steps to prohibit trades on internal White House networks.
Polymarket employs three lobbyists, per the company’s most recent federal disclosures. They include David Urban, who advised all three of Trump’s presidential campaigns, and Keaghan Ames, a former senior policy adviser to a CFTC commissioner.
The Coalition for Prediction Markets, a trade group launched by Kalshi, brought on former Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney as president and chief executive in January. Former Rep. Patrick McHenry, who acted as speaker pro tempore of the House after Kevin McCarthy’s ouster in 2023, is a senior adviser.
Democrats, who hope to win control of both the House and Senate after November’s midterm elections, have made an anti-corruption agenda a key plank of their post-midterm plans, with particular focus on placing new restrictions on the executive branch.
Landsman’s Drain the Swamp Act folds Budzinski’s PREDICT Act into a raft of “anti-corruption” bills he hopes will be taken up should Democrats win back one or more chambers.
“I don’t have a strong opinion about whether or not it’s good or bad,” the congressman said of the platforms. “My big issue is the possibility of folks with insider information betting on political events, and it should be banned.”
Landsman attributed a dearth of prediction market-related legislative action to congressional Republicans’ lack of appetite for reigning in the Trump administration.
Blumenthal, however, argues: “What’s holding up its passage is opposition from the prediction market company.”
“They are throwing their weight around in D.C., and they relish that prediction markets have become a haven for insider trading, market manipulation and underage gambling,” he said. “I’ve seen it, heard directly in their contacts with colleagues, public statements, distorting the legislation.”
Other lawmakers said they haven’t felt any such influence by Kalshi.
“I personally can’t say that I felt any of that influence,” Vindman said. “I don’t know, you know, like crypto, like AI, like these prediction markets; money has been flooding into politics. It’s actually a real problem, and I think all of these sort of tech industries have recognized that there’s a way to influence through money, and it’s a real problem we got to deal with.”
In June, Kalshi co-founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara made maxed-out donations to Vindman’s primary campaign as he ran unopposed.
“I have talked to the founders, yep,” Vindman said.
NOTUS asked what was discussed and whether the conversation influenced his thinking.
“Well, look, there are a couple of different prediction markets, and there’s one that is completely offshore; there’s like a subsidiary where I’ve seen particular [abuses] is in that market, Polymarket,” Vindman said, citing the U.S.’s indictment of a soldier alleged to have wagered on the operation to capture Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.
“We need to, obviously, meet with these industries to understand how they operate,” he added. “Prediction markets are new, and so, like, there are plenty of folks that are just not aware of the size and scope of prediction markets amongst my colleagues.”
Consider that just three years ago, Kalshi was still seeking legal clearance to operate nationwide.
Merkley was among those warning that if the CFTC blessed a “large-scale, for-profit political event betting market in the United States,” it “would profoundly undermine the sanctity and democratic value of elections.”
Ultimately, Kalshi prevailed in court. It’s since grown into a multibillion-dollar enterprise.
“Once they won that court case, they’ve been full throttle ahead,” Merkley said.
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