“an effort to create legal meaning from agency inaction that could outlast the current administration”
Industry-friendly regulators at the CFTC are not merely going easy on prediction markets, they are trying to make it structurally hard for a future, less friendly commission to reverse course. Shaw walks through a proposed rule that gives the CFTC just 10 days to open a public-interest review of a newly listed event contract, then treats the agency's failure to act as affirmative final approval of that contract after 100 days. Because the deemed approval would attach to hundreds of thousands of contracts the commission never touched, the proposal manufactures reliance interests and a 'justification tax' that any future delisting must distinguish, arguably weaponizing the Supreme Court's change-in-position doctrine against regulators. Shaw's focus is procedural rather than the substance of the 'gaming' definitions: the CEA sets no deadline for initiating review, Congress declined to add one where it added a 10-day clock for exchange rules elsewhere in the same section, and a shrinking, DOGE-purged agency cannot plausibly screen 162,000 daily contract listings in 10 days.
Some technical background helpful
Platforms mentioned: Kalshi, Polymarket