NCPG searches for new director after Kalshi donation fractures board

The resignation came quietly. Jaime Costello, the NCPG's former director of programs, felt compelled to post on LinkedIn to clarify that her departure had nothing to do with the $2 million Kalshi donation the organization accepted to fund problem gambling research. The fact that she had to say so tells you more than the denial does.

The National Council on Problem Gambling is now, by any reasonable read, an organization in institutional crisis. State gaming regulators in Nevada and Michigan have withdrawn support. Richard Schuetz, a former Las Vegas casino executive who sat on the advisory board, learned he had been removed when he noticed he wasn't on it anymore. His statement — "kind of an honor to be fired by this group" — carried the specific contempt of a man who has decided the argument is over. And a source close to the organization told GamblingHarm.org that the NCPG may be searching for a replacement for executive director Heather Maurer, though no announcement has been made.

The NCPG's public position has been consistent: the $2 million exists to study how prediction markets cause harm, not to endorse them. Maurer has been careful not to defend the product. What the organization has refused to do is take a position on whether prediction markets are legal — and that refusal is precisely what the departing regulators cannot accept. Nevada and Michigan don't read neutrality on legality as principled harm-reduction. They read it as institutional cover for a product actively fighting their jurisdiction in federal court.

They have a point, and so does the NCPG. These are not incompatible readings of the same $2 million. They are two organizations with different mandates discovering, too late, that the funding relationship implied an alignment that neither party had agreed to in writing.

What interests me here is the personnel pattern. When an organization loses a programs director, an advisory board member, and potentially its executive director within the same news cycle, the surface story is about a donation. The actual story is about what the donation revealed — a governing coalition that had not resolved a prior disagreement about what the NCPG is actually for. Is it a public health body that follows harm wherever it appears, legal status irrelevant? Or is it a consumer protection body that treats regulatory legitimacy as a precondition for engagement? Maurer's NCPG has been arguing the former. The departing regulators funded it on the assumption of the latter.

Schuetz was, by the source reporting, explicitly opposed to prediction markets and online gambling expansion. His removal, whatever the stated reason, will be read as the NCPG signaling a preference for directors who do not bring active policy positions into an advisory role. Whether that signal is accurate, or whether Schuetz was removed for entirely unrelated reasons, the optics land where they land.

The donation from Kalshi arrived while the company was simultaneously contesting state gaming authority in the Sixth and Ninth Circuits. The NCPG took the money in good faith, or what it understood as good faith. The state regulators who walked out understood it as something closer to a transaction — and in an environment where every institution adjacent to prediction markets is being asked to declare a side, neutrality reads as a position.