- Four House members from both parties introduced a bill Oct. 29 to bar registered exchanges from listing wildfire contracts.
- The bill’s one prohibition covers any contract involving a wildfire, whatever its cause, but reaches only registered venues, not offshore platforms.
- The sponsors cite more than $1 million in wildfire wagers on Polymarket during the 2025 Los Angeles fires.
- Unlike Rep. Michael Baumgartner’s August bill, this one has no Justice Department review and went to one committee, not two.
WASHINGTON – Four House members introduced a bill Oct. 29 that would prohibit CFTC-registered exchanges from listing wildfire contracts of any kind. Rep. George Whitesides, D-Calif., sponsors the No Bets on Wildfires Act, H.R. 10951, and three original cosponsors signed on at filing: Reps. James Gallagher, R-Calif., Andrea Salinas, D-Ore., and Vince Fong, R-Calif.
Whitesides, Gallagher and Fong all represent California districts. The bill amends the federal Commodity Exchange Act, which the Commodity Futures Trading Commission administers and under which registered prediction market apps list event contracts. Salinas said in the sponsors’ joint release that Oregon just had its worst wildfire season on record.
What The Bill Would Prohibit
The bill text has two sections, a short title and a prohibition. The prohibition adds a subsection to Section 5c of the act, and its operative sentence reads in full: a registered entity “shall not list for trading or accept for clearing on or through the registered entity any agreement, contract, transaction, or swap that involves a wildfire caused by whatever means.” The act defines registered entities to include designated contract markets, derivatives clearing organizations and swap execution facilities, the commission-overseen venues and clearinghouses behind event contracts.
Polymarket And The Offshore Gap
The sponsors’ release puts wildfire wagers on Polymarket at more than $1 million during the 2025 Los Angeles fires, citing the Washington Post. The markets covered burn size, affected cities and containment timing, the release said.
The Post’s August account said Polymarket’s wildfire markets run on its international platform, not its U.S. one, though some U.S. users get there by VPN, which the company’s terms prohibit. H.R. 10951 reaches only registered entities, which leaves the international platform the Post described outside it.
The sponsors argue that a wildfire market can reward someone for setting or shaping a blaze. Polymarket’s position, per the Post, is that pulling the markets would not stop a disaster, and Baumgartner’s August release said no evidence links the alleged arson to a prediction-market wager.
How It Differs From The Baumgartner Bill
H.R. 10951 follows H.R. 10109, the Wildfire Event Contract Prohibition Act, which Baumgartner, R-Wash., introduced Aug. 17. That text lists the matters it covers, among them ignition, spread, containment, evacuations and property damage.
It also carries a sense-of-Congress section on incentives and a clause leaving state gambling law intact, and it orders the attorney general to review within 180 days of enactment what existing federal law can reach, offshore platforms included.
The House referred the Baumgartner bill to the Agriculture and Judiciary committees. The newer bill has no review, no such statement and no state-law clause, and only Agriculture received it. If it is not enacted, H.R. 10951 expires with the 119th Congress on Jan. 3, 2027.
Sports Contracts Left Out
H.R. 10951 names no sport and never uses the word gaming. That keeps it apart from the court fights over legal sports betting, where states and exchanges are disputing in federal court whether state gambling law applies to sports event contracts. Section 5c already lets the commission bar a contract it finds contrary to the public interest, with unlawful activity, terrorism, assassination, war and gaming listed among the grounds, so a wildfire ban puts one category into statute without a finding by the agency.
Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., fired back at prediction markets in February with H.R. 7477, which would bar prediction platforms from taking wagers on sporting events and casino-style games.
