US Senate Bans Members From Betting on Prediction Markets — What It Means for Regular Bettors

The United States Senate voted unanimously on April 30, 2026 to ban its own members, officers, and staff from trading on prediction markets. Senate Resolution 708 passed by unanimous consent and took effect immediately as a formal amendment to the Senate’s standing rules. The vote came after a string of incidents that alarmed both lawmakers and the public — and it signals that Washington is paying far closer attention to Kalshi, Polymarket, and the broader prediction market industry than many bettors may realize.

What the Rule Actually Prohibits

Senate Resolution 708, introduced by Republican Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio, prohibits sitting senators, Senate officers, and Senate employees from placing any wager or entering into any contract on a prediction market platform. Senator Alex Padilla of California expanded the original resolution to include Senate staff before it passed. The rule amends Senate Rule XXXVII — the chamber’s standing ethics rules — and carries enforcement through the Senate Ethics Committee. Violations can result in reprimands, loss of committee assignments, or financial penalties tied to ethics proceedings.

The rule applies only to the Senate. It does not extend to House members, executive branch officials, or anyone outside the upper chamber’s jurisdiction. The resolution also urged the House, the executive branch, and the judiciary to adopt similar restrictions, though those are recommendations without binding force. A separate criminal statute does not exist yet — the prohibition is an internal governance rule, not a federal law.

What Triggered the Vote

Two specific incidents in late April accelerated the Senate’s decision. On April 22, Kalshi fined three congressional candidates for betting on their own races — a direct violation of the platform’s rules against insider trading. A week later, the Department of Justice indicted U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke, alleging he used classified military intelligence to place approximately $33,034 in 13 trades on Polymarket between December 27 and January 2, winning approximately $409,881 in profit. Van Dyke’s bets were tied to a military operation involving Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a parallel civil complaint, which the agency described as its first insider trading enforcement action involving prediction markets.

Those incidents followed months of growing concern in Congress. Academic research published just days before the Senate vote, by Columbia Law professor Joshua Mitts and University of Haifa professor Moran Ofir, analyzed two years of Polymarket data and flagged more than 210,000 suspicious wallet-market pairs. Traders in those flagged pairs posted a 69.9 percent win rate and accumulated approximately $143 million in aggregate anomalous profit — figures that drew significant media attention.

How Kalshi and Polymarket Responded

Both platforms welcomed the Senate’s action. Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour stated that his company already proactively blocks members of Congress from trading and enforces against insider trading, calling the Senate resolution “a great step to increase trust in our markets.” Polymarket posted that it was in full support and noted that its rulebook and terms of service already prohibit such conduct. Both companies had moved weeks earlier to update their insider trading policies in anticipation of congressional action, with Polymarket revising its rulebook and Kalshi launching a tool specifically to prevent political candidates from trading on their own races.

The platforms’ cooperative posture is not accidental. Supporting the Senate resolution allows them to position self-regulation as effective while avoiding a more damaging outcome: legislation that restricts what all users — not just politicians — are allowed to trade on. Proactive cooperation with ethics rules is a far better outcome for these companies than being the subject of criminal referrals or sweeping new regulations.

What This Signals About Washington and Prediction Markets

The speed of the Senate’s vote is notable. A narrow, clearly framed ethics rule passed unanimously in one afternoon — while the broader proposed ban on congressional stock trading, debated for close to a decade, remains stalled. The STOCK Act, passed in 2012, prohibits members of Congress from using nonpublic information to trade securities, but enforcement has been widely criticized as inconsistent. Prediction market regulation is following a similar trajectory: legislators can agree on banning their own participation more easily than they can agree on comprehensive legislation that affects the industry at large.

Multiple bills to regulate prediction markets more broadly are moving through Congress, including the PREDICT Act and the Public Integrity in Financial Markets Act of 2026, which would extend restrictions to the president, vice president, political appointees, and senior executive branch staff. Whether any of those advance remains uncertain. CFTC Director of Enforcement David Miller has named insider trading on prediction markets as one of the agency’s top five enforcement priorities, signaling that federal regulators intend to act with or without new statutory authority.

What It Means for Regular Bettors

For ordinary users of Kalshi and Polymarket, the Senate ethics rule changes nothing directly. Regular bettors are not covered by the restriction, and neither platform has indicated any intention to limit the markets available to everyday users. The more significant question is whether congressional scrutiny leads to broader legislation — and the honest answer is that it might, but it has not yet. The Van Dyke indictment demonstrates that federal prosecutors can already pursue insider trading cases under the Commodity Exchange Act without new laws.

What bettors should watch is whether the House follows with its own restriction, and whether any of the pending bills move to a floor vote. A sports contract ban proposed by Senators John Curtis and Adam Schiff — which would prohibit federally regulated prediction markets from offering anything resembling a sports bet — would be far more consequential for users than the Senate ethics rule. That bill has not advanced, but its existence reflects a segment of Congress that views prediction market sports contracts as closer to gambling than to financial instruments. For now, platforms like Kalshi remain available to all users in all 50 states, and bettors in states without legal sports betting can continue using them. Anyone already using sportsbook reviews to compare options should also keep an eye on prediction market developments — they are increasingly part of the same competitive landscape.