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Federal Sports Betting Front Opens — Schiff Bipartisan Bill Targets Prediction Markets as Senate Schedules May 20 Hearing on Sports Integrity

Sen. Schiff accuses CFTC Chair Selig of "duplicity" as bipartisan Prediction Markets Security and Integrity Act and competing STOP Corrupt Bets Act head into Senate Commerce Subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, May 20.

Category: iGaming News - USA · By Growl Games Editorial Team · Sun May 17 2026 · Updated Thu Jul 23 2026

Federal Sports Betting Front Opens — Schiff Bipartisan Bill Targets Prediction Markets as Senate Schedules May 20 Hearing on Sports Integrity

Table of Contents

Summary

A federal legislative front on sports betting and prediction markets opened decisively this past week. On May 13, Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) publicly accused Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Michael Selig of "duplicity" in his stance on event contracts and reiterated his push for a bipartisan Prediction Markets Security and Integrity Act. Six days from today, on Wednesday, May 20, 2026 at 10:00 a.m., the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Technology, and Data Privacy convenes a formal hearing titled "No Sure Bets: Protecting Sports Integrity in America" — the first Congressional session to address sports prediction markets in a formal legislative setting. The combination establishes a federal sports-integrity track that runs parallel to the existing state-AG (covered earlier this month with the 41-AG letter to the CFTC), tribal (Wisconsin Ho-Chunk Nation IGRA ruling on May 11), state-legislative (Minnesota SF 4760 passed May 13), and state-court (Massachusetts, Tennessee, Third Circuit) pressure points already in play.

The Schiff Intervention

Schiff's May 13 statement, reported by Bettors Insider and corroborated across federal-policy outlets, frames the federal-versus-state preemption question at the heart of the prediction-markets dispute. Schiff argues that CFTC Chair Michael Selig has publicly described sports prediction markets and sports betting as "two separate things" while the underlying contracts function as sports wagers in every economically meaningful sense — what Schiff characterised as a duplicitous public posture. Schiff's broader argument runs alongside positions articulated by the 41-state-AG comment letter filed with the CFTC on April 30 and the Wisconsin Attorney General's parallel state-court enforcement actions. The Schiff bill is co-sponsored by senators across both parties; its specific legislative text retains state authority to regulate sports wagering while removing sports outcomes from the scope of permissible CFTC-designated contract market listings.

Two Competing Bills

Two pieces of legislation are currently in motion. The Prediction Markets Security and Integrity Act — the Schiff bipartisan bill — would explicitly remove sports outcomes, political elections, and certain other event categories from the universe of contracts that CFTC-designated contract markets are permitted to list, effectively returning state gambling authority to those contract types. The STOP Corrupt Bets Act takes a different approach, focused on data-sharing and integrity-monitoring standards between sportsbooks, prediction markets, and the major sports leagues. The two bills are not directly competitive; they could be passed sequentially or merged in committee. A third proposal in the same space — the SAFE Bet Act introduced by Rep. Paul Tonko and Sen. Richard Blumenthal — proposes uniform federal standards for marketing, affordability, and consumer-protection rules across both sportsbooks and prediction markets.

The May 20 Hearing

Senate Commerce Subcommittee Chairwoman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) chairs the May 20 session. Other subcommittee members participating include Sens. Todd Young (R-IN), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), and John Thune (R-SD). Senate Commerce full-committee Chair Ted Cruz (R-TX) framed the session: "Fans shouldn't have to wonder if their favorite player missed a buzzer-beater or dropped a touchdown pass because of a secret bet. Unfortunately, recent episodes have planted that seed of doubt and raised questions about whether changes are necessary to integrity in sports." The "recent episodes" Cruz refers to include the January 2026 federal indictment of 26 people in the international NCAA / Chinese Basketball Association point-shaving scheme; the October 2025 NBA-linked indictments of Terry Rozier, Chauncey Billups, and Damon Jones; the November 2025 indictments of MLB pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz; and parallel UFC and MLS integrity matters. The hearing will be live-streamed on YouTube and the subcommittee's website. The session is a fact-finding exercise; no votes are scheduled.

The Witness List Signals

The witness list, published by the Senate Commerce Committee, is the more telling document. American Gaming Association President and CEO Bill Miller will present the licensed sportsbook position. Tennessee Sports Wagering Council Executive Director Mary Beth Thomas brings the state regulator perspective. Integrity Compliance 360 (IC360) Co-Founder and CEO Scott Sadin — whose firm has flagged irregular betting in several high-profile college and professional cases, and whose IXUP / DataWorks subsidiary built the technology stack behind Australia's BetStop and Ontario's BetGuard (launched today) — provides the integrity-monitoring view. The Coalition for Prediction Markets is represented by Patrick McHenry, the former House Financial Services Committee chairman, signalling that the prediction-market industry is being treated as a legitimate participant in the federal conversation rather than as a target of it. The Senate Commerce Committee may add an additional witness before the hearing date.

The Wider Federal Stack

The May 20 hearing sits inside a thickening federal enforcement and legislative stack on prediction markets and sports betting. The Senate voted unanimously earlier this month to ban members and staff from participating in prediction markets. The CFTC, in parallel, has issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking on the scope of "gaming" and "sports competition" in event-contract listings and is litigating against Wisconsin, Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, and New York to assert federal preemption over state gambling-law enforcement against CFTC-regulated event contracts. The Third Circuit affirmed a preliminary injunction in Kalshi's favour against New Jersey on April 6. A Tennessee federal court granted Kalshi a preliminary injunction in February. A Massachusetts state court ruled against Kalshi in January. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin ruled on May 11 that the Ho-Chunk Nation has shown a "likelihood of success" on its Indian Gaming Regulatory Act claim, marking the first federal-court precedent siding with a tribe against the prediction-market platform. Minnesota's legislature passed SF 4760 on May 13, criminalising operation and advertising of prediction markets. The American Gaming Association's State of the States 2026 report, released May 12, estimated $500m-plus in diverted sports-betting tax revenue to prediction markets to date and $53.9 billion in annual illegal-gambling revenue more broadly.

What It Means

For Congress, the May 20 hearing is the first formal opportunity for federal legislators to evaluate prediction markets as a regulated industry rather than as an emergent regulatory question. For Kalshi, Polymarket, Robinhood Derivatives, and Crypto.com (Foris Dax Markets), the inclusion of Patrick McHenry as a witness signals the industry will get a hearing — but Schiff's "duplicity" framing and the parallel state-level pressure make clear that "getting a seat at the table" does not equate to keeping sports event contracts available indefinitely under current federal preemption. For state-licensed sportsbook operators (DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars), the federal track raises both opportunity (clarification that sports betting is state-regulated only) and risk (uniform federal advertising and consumer-protection standards via the SAFE Bet Act). For the major sports leagues (NBA, MLB, NFL, NHL, NCAA, UFC, MLS), the hearing is the most concentrated federal scrutiny on the integrity-monitoring infrastructure they have funded to date — with concrete proposals from NCAA President Charlie Baker on player-prop elimination and IC360-led data-sharing standards likely to be amplified. For offshore real-money operators serving U.S. users, the federal stack now visibly includes all three branches plus state-level actors — a multi-front enforcement environment that is structurally distinct from the single-vector regulatory exposure offshore operators have historically operated under.

Sources

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