President Trump Achieves Unanimous 100-0 Senate Vote

The rule change modifies Senate ethics guidelines and applies exclusively to the Senate chamber. It does not require action by the House or the president.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) supported the initiative on the Senate floor and urged the House to adopt identical standards. “Speaker Johnson should immediately do the same thing in the House,” Schumer said.

A similar effort is already underway in the House, led by Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa), as part of ongoing discussions about ethics and financial conduct by lawmakers.

The action addresses concerns that prediction markets—platforms allowing wagers on elections, legislation, geopolitical events, and other high-stakes outcomes—create conflicts of interest for officials with access to sensitive or nonpublic information. Supporters maintain that such trading erodes public confidence in Congress.

Industry representatives welcomed the Senate’s decision. Polymarket stated it supports codifying restrictions into law and already prohibits insider trading on its platform. Kalshi co-founder Tarek Mansour called the rule “a great step to increase trust in our markets by making it an industry standard,” noting that his company already blocks members of Congress from participating and enforces strict anti-insider-trading policies.

Despite the unanimous Senate vote, the reform has important limitations. It covers only senators and Senate staff, leaving members of the House, executive-branch officials, and the broader federal workforce outside its scope for now.

Sens. Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) have introduced separate bipartisan legislation that would extend similar prohibitions across the entire federal government, barring officials from using insider information to bet on prediction markets.

The Senate’s move occurs amid broader national debates over congressional ethics, including repeated but stalled proposals to ban stock trading by members of Congress while in office. While those efforts have faced repeated roadblocks, the prediction-market ban achieved swift and unanimous passage.

Lawmakers and observers described the action as a modest but meaningful step toward restoring trust in Congress. Critics, however, note that without parallel restrictions in the House and the executive branch, significant gaps in oversight remain.

As the Senate returns from recess, attention is expected to shift toward whether the House follows suit and whether the Young-Slotkin bill gains momentum. The development highlights both the potential for bipartisan cooperation on narrow ethics issues and the challenges of achieving comprehensive reform across all branches of government.