By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Here’s a test worth running on any story about industry influence in government: swap the jerseys. Take the same facts, change the industry and the party, and see if your gut reaction changes. If it does, you’re not reacting to the conduct — you’re reacting to the uniform.
So let’s run it.
In April 2025, according to public records first obtained by WBFF-TV’s Spotlight on Maryland unit through a Public Information Act request, the American Gaming Association — the trade group representing commercial casinos — handed Maryland gaming regulators a “sample letter” to send to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The letter urged the CFTC to crack down on sports prediction markets, the Kalshi- and Polymarket-style platforms that let people trade contracts on the outcome of sporting events. John Martin, director of the Maryland Lottery and Gaming Control Agency, emailed colleagues on April 22, 2025, describing “possible action” through a “sample letter to be emailed to the CFTC Commissioners” — a letter he specified was “provided by the American Gaming Association (AGA).”
Eight days later, on April 30, 2025, the Maryland Lottery and Gaming Control Agency sent the CFTC a letter. It opened: “As the regulatory body charged with licensing and overseeing the legal gaming industry in Maryland, I write today to express my grave concerns regarding the introduction of so-called ‘sports event contracts.'” The AGA’s template had opened: “As the regulatory bodies charged with licensing and overseeing the legal gaming industry in our states, we write today to express our grave concerns regarding the introduction of so-called ‘sport event contracts.'” Change “bodies” to “body,” change “in our states” to “in Maryland,” and the sentence — like most of the letter that follows it — is identical.
A spokesman for the agency told Spotlight on Maryland that Maryland Lottery and Gaming “independently evaluated this issue and determined its stance based on what is in the State’s best interests.” The AGA, for its part, didn’t dispute that it supplied the draft before the agency sent it to federal regulators.
Now: swap the jerseys. Imagine a state utility regulator in a red state gets a “sample letter” from an oil and gas trade association urging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to slow-walk approval of competing solar interconnections. Eight days later, the regulator sends FERC a letter that’s a near word-for-word match, changing only the pronouns. When a reporter asks about it, the regulator’s office says it “independently evaluated” the issue.
Nobody, center-right or center-left, would call that an independent evaluation. They’d call it what it is — a regulator functioning as a mouthpiece for the industry it’s supposed to oversee, dressed up as policy analysis.
They’d call it what it is — a regulator functioning as a mouthpiece for the industry it’s supposed to oversee, dressed up as policy analysis.
The financial motive here isn’t subtle. Maryland Lottery and Gaming’s own numbers show the state’s sports wagering market contributed $132,318,369 to the state in fiscal year 2026, including $7,623,083 in June alone. Sports event contracts on prediction markets don’t currently pay that tax. Every dollar that migrates from a licensed Maryland sportsbook to an unlicensed prediction-market trade is a dollar the state doesn’t tax. The agency that stands to lose that revenue is the same agency that borrowed its federal advocacy letter, nearly verbatim, from the industry that stands to lose the customers.
To be fair to Martin’s agency, it’s worth separating two different things happening in Annapolis at the same time. While the Lottery and Gaming Control Agency was recycling AGA talking points, Attorney General Anthony Brown’s office was doing something categorically different: filing, alongside 40 other state attorneys general, a lengthy, heavily footnoted legal brief with the CFTC arguing — through statutory text, Supreme Court precedent, and the major-questions doctrine — that sports event contracts fall outside the commission’s jurisdiction. Whatever you think of the underlying policy position, that’s actual legal work: original argument, built from the Commodity Exchange Act’s text and case law, not a lobbyist’s draft with the serial numbers filed off.
That’s actual legal work: original argument… not a lobbyist’s draft with the serial numbers filed off.
That contrast is the real story here, and it’s one Maryland taxpayers should sit with. One arm of state government did the job the way it’s supposed to be done — independent analysis, original argument, its own name on its own reasoning. Another arm of state government took a shortcut and got caught because, in Maryland, a Public Information Act request can still surprise you with the receipts.
The underlying policy question — whether the CFTC or the states should regulate sports event contracts — is a real and unsettled one, working its way through federal courts and Congress right now. Reasonable people, including reasonable regulators, can land on either side of it. What’s not reasonable is a state agency outsourcing its “independent” federal advocacy to the industry it regulates, then telling reporters it reached that position on its own.
Maryland deserves regulators who do their own homework — even when, maybe especially when, the industry offering to do it for them is one Maryland’s budget has learned to depend on.
Documentation for this piece draws on public records first obtained and published by WBFF-TV’s Spotlight on Maryland unit, and on the Maryland Attorney General’s April 30, 2026, comment letter to the CFTC.
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As a Maryland resident, I appreciate this deep dive. The comparison to CFTC standards is eye-opening—regulators should be independent, not taking notes from the industries they oversee.