Michael Selig, President Donald Trump’s nominee to chair the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, speaks during a hearing of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee on November 19, 2025, at the Capitol in Washington, DC.
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In an unreported letter to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, six Democratic senators expressed strong concerns about prediction market contracts that “promote physical injury or death” and said the contracts “pose a national security risk.”
In a letter sent Monday, the senators asked CFTC Chairman Michael Selig to “unequivocally reiterate that the CFTC categorically prohibits contracts that settle upon, or are closely connected to, an individual’s death.”
The letter notes that under the Federal Commodity Regulations, the CFTC already “categorically prohibits” contracts that involve or refer to terrorism, assassination, war, or similar acts.
The letter comes amid the growing popularity of prediction markets such as Polymarket and Calci, raising questions about how these markets should be regulated, whether they are contributing to the rise in gambling addiction, and the risk of someone with inside information taking contractual positions.
The letter notes that the CFTC “cleared the way” for Polymarket to re-enter the U.S. market after U.S. users were ostensibly blocked from accessing contracts on the company’s offshore exchanges.
The Democrats who signed the letter are Sen. Adam Schiff of California, Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, and Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen of Nevada.
The CFTC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter, which cited three contracts offered by Polymarket in recent months related to NASA spacecraft launches, the fate of Venezuela’s authoritarian leader and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“These recent events highlight the lack of internal controls and safeguards to prevent insiders from profiting from non-public information or directly profiteering from human suffering,” the letter said.
The CFTC filed legal briefs in a federal appeals court last week arguing that the commission has exclusive jurisdiction over the U.S. commodity derivatives market and that states have no role in exercising such oversight.
“The CFTC can no longer stand by and watch overzealous state governments undermine the agency’s exclusive jurisdiction over these markets by seeking to establish statewide bans on these attractive products,” Selig wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial about the filing.
The senators’ letter noted that one of Polymarket’s contracts asked whether NASA’s upcoming human spaceflight mission, Artemis II, would explode.
In the deal, which Polymarket listed on Jan. 20, the “yes” bet traded as high as 8% before “subsequently being renamed and ultimately withdrawn due to public outcry,” the letter said.
“This contract not only directly contributed to the death of the crew, but also facilitated the possibility of mission failure and insider sabotage,” the letter said.
In a Feb. 15 post on X about the controversy, Polymarket said, “To be clear, this is a market on the possibility of booster stage rupture, a defined hardware failure scenario, and not on the safety of the Orion crew capsule or astronauts. This is not a market on crew injury or loss of life.”
Another deal in Polymarket concerned whether Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro would be removed from power.
On January 5, an unidentified trader placed a $20,000 bet that Maduro would step down by January 31. About two hours after the bet was placed, President Donald Trump ordered a military strike on Venezuela that captured Maduro and deported him to the United States to face criminal prosecution.
“When Polymarket settled the contract approximately 12 hours later, this trader had made more than $400,000 in profits,” the letter said, citing a Wall Street Journal report.
An advertisement for Polymarket at a subway station in New York, USA, on Thursday, February 5, 2026.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
In the third example cited by the senators, “In November 2025, Polymarket resolved a deal that the Ukrainian town of Mirnokhad would be occupied by the Russian military by November 15th, and individuals who bet YES received a profit of 33,000 percent.”
“Subsequent public reporting revealed that officials at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, had edited maps to show that Russia had captured key intersections in the town, ‘despite there being no indication’ that Russia had made such an advance,” the senators wrote.
“This is a contract that clearly ‘involves, relates to, or refers to’ war, and clearly demonstrates the dangers of listing such a contract.”
The letter said the three contracts “highlight dangerous incentives tied directly or indirectly to the provision of contracts that relate to prohibited categories under the Commodity Exchange Act.”
The senators warned that government officials, regulated entities, and consultants who may have knowledge of potential policy changes “could easily manipulate confidential or operationally sensitive information for personal gain in a market that operates with minimal oversight or transparency, or share this information with parties who could also benefit.”
“These contracts further increase the risk of promoting real-world harm by creating financial rewards associated with destabilizing events and physical injuries, or by encouraging actors to influence or induce those outcomes for personal gain,” the letter states.
