One Seat, No Board
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is a five-seat bipartisan board by design. As of this writing it has one seat filled. Michael S. Selig, a 36-year-old former corporate lawyer who represented crypto firms and worked with prediction-market operators before joining government, is both chairman and the only sitting commissioner — every other seat left vacant by the president who appointed him. That structure hands one person unilateral authority to file the agency's lawsuits, write its rules, and decide what doesn't get investigated, over an industry in which the president's own family holds financial stakes.
Selig's predecessor didn't get the job by accident of process. Trump's first choice to chair the CFTC, Brian Quintenz — a former commissioner and a board member of a prediction-market company — has said his nomination collapsed after he declined a specific ask from Gemini co-founder Tyler Winklevoss: that Quintenz treat Gemini's internal-affairs complaint against CFTC enforcement staff as his top priority. Quintenz released texts in which Winklevoss pressed him on it and said he'd be "happy to raise this issue with the president himself." Trump withdrew Quintenz's nomination in September 2025. Selig got the job in December.
The Revolving Door
Brigitte Weyls, senior counsel to then-acting chair Caroline Pham, personally drafted the recommendation memo approving Gemini Titan's prediction-market application — a reversal of the normal order, in which staff write recommendations for counsel to review, not the other way around. Months later, Weyls became general counsel of Gemini Titan, the company whose application she had just helped clear. Pham, who intervened on behalf of Polymarket and Crypto.com during the same stretch, left the chair's office in December 2025 to join MoonPay — a crypto firm whose announced "exclusive" prediction-market partner is Polymarket.
The officials who raised the concerns Weyls and Pham overrode did not fare as well. Rachel Berdansky and Rahul Varma — who questioned the strength of Polymarket's anti-fraud protections at a November 2025 examination Weyls unusually attended in person — were placed on administrative leave and under investigation within weeks; Berdansky has since retired. Vince McGonagle, who had held up Gemini's application the year before, was pushed out the same way. Three more officials who had enforced crypto-related cases — Gretchen Lowe, Manal Sultan, and K. Brent Tomer — were investigated, demoted, or ousted in the agency's 2025 restructuring. None were told what they'd done wrong. The agency's overall workforce fell by roughly a quarter in a single year, to its smallest headcount in at least two decades.
Current and former agency staff told the Times the message the workforce took from all of this was simple: don't cause trouble for the industries the president's family has a stake in.
The Agency Investigated Its Own Case — And Didn't Like What It Found
The clearest documented evidence that this isn't just a hiring-and-firing pattern came after the Times investigation published. Gemini paid a $5 million CFTC penalty in January 2025 for misleading agency staff about a Bitcoin auction, without admitting wrongdoing. On May 27, 2026, the CFTC itself — under Selig — asked a federal judge to vacate that same penalty, on the basis of its own internal investigation's finding that the agency's enforcement division had "resorted to inappropriate tactics" to build the case and "extract a settlement," including relying on a non-credible whistleblower account, withholding evidence from a commissioner ahead of a vote, and — the detail worth sitting with — pressuring Gemini during the enforcement action by threatening to withhold approval of its prediction-market platform unless it settled.
Read that last part again: the same agency that is supposed to police whether prediction-market approvals are being used as leverage now says, in its own court filing, that a past version of itself used a prediction-market approval as leverage — just in the opposite direction, to force a settlement rather than to reward cooperation. Either account is a regulator turning a licensing decision into a bargaining chip. The current chair's position is that only the earlier instance was misconduct.
What the Agency Isn't Doing
In the same period, Kalshi referred 32 possible insider traders to the CFTC in the three months ending June 2026 alone — part of more than 50 referrals from Kalshi and over 90 from Polymarket so far this year — while the trading commission has brought civil charges against just three prediction-market bettors total. The one enforcement case Selig has publicly pointed to as proof the agency is "vigilantly" policing the space involves a U.S. Special Forces soldier charged by the CFTC and the Justice Department with using classified knowledge of a military operation against Nicolás Maduro to bet on Polymarket's outcome — a case this desk is tracking separately on the Venezuela thread. Venezuela Oil Tracker → The agency has not said whether it is separately examining Polymarket's own practices, even though the indictment notes the soldier placed his bets through Polymarket's international platform using a tool the company says it bans — the same platform Polymarket promised the CFTC it would wall off from exactly this kind of access when it settled with the agency in 2022.
The Family Stake
None of this sits apart from the Trump family's direct financial position in the industry the CFTC now barely polices. Donald Trump Jr. is a paid adviser to Kalshi and an investor in Polymarket through his venture firm, 1789 Capital, which put money into Polymarket shortly after the company asked the CFTC for looser rules on betting through intermediaries. Gemini's founders, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, are financial backers of American Bitcoin — a crypto firm co-founded by Eric Trump. Trump Media & Technology Group, in which the president is the largest shareholder, has an "exclusive" marketing arrangement with Crypto.com's prediction-market business and says it plans similar deals with others. Each of those relationships sits on the other side of a regulator with one commissioner, a workforce cut by a quarter, and a documented pattern of removing the staff who raised objections to exactly these firms.