Massachusetts Gaming Chair Warns Congress CFTC Lacks Consumer Protections

Massachusetts Gaming chair tells Congress the CFTC cannot protect its consumers

Jordan Maynard did not go to Washington to argue about preemption. He went to describe what happens when a consumer in Massachusetts believes they have been wronged by a prediction market platform and calls the agency they think is responsible.

The Massachusetts Gaming Commission, Maynard told a House subcommittee on November 11, fields regular complaints from consumers who assume the state regulates sports prediction markets. The commission cannot help them. It lacks the authority. The CFTC, which does have authority under the Commodity Exchange Act, lacks — in Maynard's framing — the capacity. His written testimony made the point plainly: a federal regulator claiming exclusive jurisdiction over an industry serving retail consumers in every state does not have the manpower to perform consumer-facing regulatory work across all of them.

This is a different problem from preemption, and it has been underreported in the litigation noise of the past several weeks. The Arkansas and Louisiana cases are fights about which sovereign gets to regulate prediction market contracts. The Massachusetts testimony is about what happens in the gap between the two answers — when a consumer falls into the space where the state cannot act and the federal regulator is not built to respond.

Maynard's commission has its own history with Kalshi. A state court injunction in September 2025 attempted to stop Kalshi from offering sports event contracts in Massachusetts; an appeals court suspended it while Kalshi's challenge proceeded. The contracts remain available. The commission remains unable to enforce its own rules against them. What Maynard described to the subcommittee is the lived consequence of that suspension: consumers contacting a regulator that cannot help, about a platform it cannot touch, governed by an agency it cannot coordinate with.

The CFTC's theory of exclusive jurisdiction under the Commodity Exchange Act has held up in several federal courts. The agency's position is that event contracts are swaps, DCM-registered platforms are federally regulated, and state gambling law cannot reach them. That argument has real support in the statutory text and in the case law developing around it. I think it is likely to hold at the preemption level in most circuits.

But preemption of state authority is not the same as adequacy of federal protection. A jurisdictional win for the CFTC establishes who governs. It does not establish that the governing is happening. Maynard's testimony is targeted at exactly that gap, and it is the kind of institutional argument that tends to have a longer shelf life than the litigation that surrounds it — because it frames a problem that persists regardless of who wins in Arkansas.