NCPG director search puts responsible gambling's future on the line

Heather Maurer's position at the National Council on Problem Gambling was already strained when Nevada and Michigan withdrew their support. The anonymous account given to GamblingHarm.org — that the organization is now searching for a new director — suggests the damage from accepting Kalshi's $2 million donation has moved from institutional to personal.

The sequence matters. Jaime Costello, the director of programs, resigned and felt compelled to state publicly that the donation had nothing to do with her decision. Richard Schuetz, a former Las Vegas casino executive who had served on the advisory board with a documented record of opposing prediction market expansion, found himself removed without notification. His response — "kind of an honor to be fired by this group" — was dry, but the picture it completes is not.

What the NCPG said when it accepted the money was that Kalshi's $2 million would fund research into how prediction markets cause harm, not advocacy for their expansion. That is a defensible position on its own terms. A harm-reduction body studying a new category of product is doing what harm-reduction bodies exist to do. The problem is that the organization has also said, repeatedly, that it will not involve itself in questions of legality — which means it has accepted money from an entity currently fighting in federal courts to avoid state gambling regulation, while explicitly declining to take any position on whether that fight matters.

The states that withdrew funding — Nevada and Michigan — are the same states whose regulators have been on the losing end of Kalshi's federal preemption arguments in some circuits and the winning end in others. They are not neutral observers. Neither, though, was Schuetz, whose removal is hard to characterize as purely procedural.

The NCPG has handled this by holding the line: the donation was appropriate, the research mandate is intact, the organization remains focused on harm wherever it occurs. That framing requires a kind of institutional steadiness that becomes harder to project when the director of programs has left and the advisory board is visibly contracting. A leadership search at this moment does not project steadiness.

Whoever takes the role will inherit a specific problem. The NCPG's credibility with state regulators depends on being seen as independent of the industry it monitors. Its funding model has always made that independence complicated — industry money has long flowed into responsible gambling research through bodies like this one. The Kalshi donation is not structurally different from other arrangements the organization has accepted. What is different is that Kalshi is not a settled part of the regulatory landscape. It is a company currently arguing in federal court that state gambling authorities have no jurisdiction over its products. Accepting its money while declining to have a view on that argument is not neutrality. It is a position.

The consensus read on this is that the NCPG is managing a temporary credibility problem that a new director and some careful messaging will resolve. That may be right, and I have checked the instinct to call it wrong simply because the consensus holds it. But the organizations that recover from this kind of fracture are usually the ones where the underlying question gets answered, not managed. The underlying question here — what a responsible gambling body owes to the regulators whose authority it implicitly relies on — has not been answered.