What Is the End Prediction Market Corruption Act?

The End Prediction Market Corruption Act is a U.S. Senate bill introduced on March 5, 2026 by Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) that would prohibit the President, Vice President, members of Congress, and senior federal officials — along with their spouses and dependent children — from trading event contracts on prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket. It is the first federal legislation specifically targeting the conflict-of-interest problem created when the officials who shape policy can also place bets on their own decisions.

The bill emerged after a sequence of high-profile episodes in which politically connected traders appeared to benefit from non-public information — including well-timed Iran-war contracts and large positions on policy announcements — and after a parallel House effort led by Representative Ritchie Torres to impose broader restrictions on prediction markets tied to government action.

What the Bill Actually Prohibits

The legislation is narrower than a full prediction-market ban. It focuses specifically on corruption exposure for federal officeholders.

• Covered persons: The President, Vice President, members of Congress, senior Executive Branch officials, and their spouses and dependent children.
• Covered activity: Trading event contracts on CFTC-registered designated contract markets (DCMs) and unregistered venues accessible to U.S. residents.
• Scope of contracts: Bets on government policy decisions, political outcomes, elections, and government action — the categories where officials hold non-public information by definition.
• Enforcement: The bill adds prediction-market trades to the list of prohibited transactions under existing federal ethics law, with civil penalties and referral pathways to the Office of Government Ethics.

It does not ban prediction markets themselves and does not affect trading by private citizens, operators, or institutional market makers.

Why It Matters for Operators

For B2B platforms and operators watching the regulatory perimeter around event contracts, the bill is a signal of where the political pressure is heading — and where compliance obligations will tighten first.

• KYC and employer-screening expectations will rise. If the bill passes, CFTC-registered venues will need to screen against a politically exposed persons (PEP) list that includes federal officials and family members — infrastructure most prediction markets do not currently run.
• Suspicious-activity reporting becomes a live surveillance workflow. Operators will need to detect, flag, and report covered-person activity. That requires the same kind of identity-linked pattern detection that regulated sportsbooks already use for integrity monitoring.
• Cross-product compliance load grows. Operators offering both sports-contract and policy-contract markets will need segmented surveillance rules — policy categories carry the bill's exposure, sports categories do not.

The bill is also a political marker. It draws a line between event contracts on entertainment outcomes (sports, awards shows, entertainment milestones) and event contracts on government action, where the insider-information risk is structural rather than episodic.

How It Sits Alongside Other 2026 Bills

The End Prediction Market Corruption Act is one piece of a broader 2026 legislative push.

• BETS Off Act — Broader federal framework targeting sports-related prediction markets and state-level enforcement gaps.
• Prediction Market Integrity Act of 2026 — Focuses on surveillance standards, position limits, and insider-trading rules across all event contracts.
• Blumenthal–Kim bill — Pairs the Senate's ethics focus with market-integrity provisions aimed at offshore and crypto-native venues.
• Ritchie Torres House bill — A stricter House counterpart that would ban any prediction market on government action, not just restrict officials from trading.

Together these bills represent the first serious federal attempt to define the regulatory boundary between prediction markets and traditional gambling, rather than leaving it to CFTC no-action letters and state enforcement actions.

What Happens Next

The bill has been referred to the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Given the split Congress and the Trump administration's active litigation against states attempting their own prediction-market restrictions, passage in the current session is uncertain. The more likely near-term outcome is that its ethics-screening language gets absorbed into the CFTC's 2026 ANPRM on prediction-market rulemaking, where PEP screening and covered-person restrictions are already open questions.

For operators and intelligence-layer vendors serving prediction-market platforms, the planning assumption should be that some form of covered-person restriction is coming — and that the surveillance and KYC infrastructure to support it needs to be in the 2026 roadmap rather than bolted on after the fact.

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Last verified: April 2026