Federal Sports Betting Legislation Attempts Since PASPA Repeal

The Supreme Court's May 14, 2018 decision in Murphy v. NCAA did not deregulate sports betting so much as redirect who controls it. The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, enacted in 1992, had barred states from authorizing sports gambling, and the Court struck it down on Tenth Amendment grounds, finding that Congress had impermissibly commandeered state legislatures by forcing them to maintain a federal policy they had no part in writing. The majority opinion closed with a sentence that set the terms for everything that followed: "Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each State is free to act on its own." That line was a conditional offer, not a permanent handoff of authority, and the distinction matters because Congress was told it could still act. States did not wait to find out whether it would. New Jersey, which had driven the case to the Court, moved immediately: Governor Phil Murphy signed the state's sports betting bill on June 11, 2018, and placed the first legal bet at a William Hill sportsbook at Monmouth Park the following week. Within weeks of the ruling, the vacuum the Court had opened was already being filled by states rather than by Congress, and it has stayed that way ever since.

The warning that came with the ruling: why federal action was predicted to be urgent

The case for federal legislation was made before any bill existed. On May 23, 2018, barely a week after the decision, Senator Orrin Hatch published an op-ed announcing his intent to introduce a federal framework, warning that states would compete for sports betting revenue by loosening their own rules until the result became a patchwork race to the regulatory bottom. That phrase defined the argument every subsequent federal bill would carry: without a national floor, states would undercut each other on consumer protection to attract operators and tax revenue. The warning proved accurate in a narrow but measurable sense. State tax rates on gross gaming revenue have since ranged from New York's 51% down to the single digits elsewhere, the exact kind of divergence Hatch had predicted before a single state had finished writing its regulations. What Hatch did not anticipate, or at least did not manage to prevent, was how long it would take Congress to answer its own warning. The sense of urgency in May 2018 did not translate into legislative motion at anything close to the same speed, and the gap between the warning and the response became its own part of the story.

The Sports Wagering Market Integrity Act of 2018

Senators Orrin Hatch and Chuck Schumer introduced the Sports Wagering Market Integrity Act of 2018, S.3793, as the first serious attempt to build the federal framework Hatch had promised. The bill proposed a general prohibition on sports wagering, with exceptions for states that applied to a federal agency for approval of their own programs, and it paired that structure with a Wagering Trust Fund, amendments to the Wire Act and the Sports Bribery Act, and a mandate for another federal agency to fund addiction prevention and treatment. The NFL backed the bill without reservation; a league spokesman said, "To protect consumers and the integrity of our games, we urge the swift enactment of The Sports Wagering Market Integrity Act of 2018." The gaming industry did not share that enthusiasm, chiefly because of a provision requiring sportsbooks to use official league data, a mandate that would have given leagues a commercial cut of every wager placed. The American Gaming Association pushed back on that requirement, and the disagreement became public at a House subcommittee hearing in September 2018, where the NFL and the AGA presented opposing views on federal oversight in the same room. The bill never advanced to a floor vote. One analysis of the legislation found that it "suffers from some of the same Tenth Amendment concerns as PASPA," meaning the bill written to answer a ruling about federal overreach into state authority may have carried the same structural defect that doomed the law it was meant to replace.

Six years of congressional silence while states built their own systems

No comparable federal sports betting bill followed SWMIA for six years. Congress introduced nothing of similar scope between its failure in 2018 and the next major attempt in 2024, and that silence was not a pause with no consequences. Dozens of states spent those six years building licensing regimes, tax structures, and consumer protection rules of their own, each calibrated to its own legislature's priorities. The system that filled the vacuum proved durable rather than provisional: the American Gaming Association reported that U.S. commercial gaming industry revenue reached a record high in 2025, up from the year before. That scale changes the political arithmetic for any future federal bill, because a national floor no longer has to be built on open ground. It has to be negotiated against state budgets and regulatory agencies that already exist and already depend on the revenue those systems generate. The tax divergence Hatch had warned about, New York's 51% against Nevada's rate near the floor, widened through this period with no federal check in place.

The SAFE Bet Act's first introduction in September 2024: what the bill proposed

Representative Paul Tonko introduced the Supporting Affordability and Fairness with Every Bet Act, known as the SAFE Bet Act, as HR 9590 in September 2024, with Senator Richard Blumenthal introducing a companion bill, S. 5057, in the Senate. It was the first comprehensive federal proposal built around the public health consequences of state-level legalization rather than around market structure or league commercial interests. The contrast with SWMIA is a measure of how the debate had shifted in six years: where the 2018 bill centered on official data mandates and market integrity, the 2024 bill centered on advertising restrictions, deposit limits, and bans on using artificial intelligence to target bettors. By September 2025, the bill had not advanced through Congress. Tonko continued to make the case publicly, telling Spectrum News that the legislation was needed more than ever, while GovTrack's 2025 analysis assigned the House version a 3% chance of enactment, a figure that placed it in roughly the same legislative territory as SWMIA had occupied seven years earlier.

The 2025 reintroduction of the SAFE Bet Act: specific provisions, committee referrals, and prospects

Tonko and Blumenthal reintroduced the SAFE Bet Act in March 2025 with companion bills in both chambers, and the new version stands as the most detailed federal sports betting proposal on record. H.R. 2087, sponsored by a member of the House representing a New York district, was introduced in the House on March 11, 2025, and referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce and the Committee on Natural Resources. S.1033, sponsored by a senator, was introduced in the Senate on March 13, 2025, and referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill's provisions cover more ground than either prior attempt. States would need approval of their sports betting programs from a federal agency every three years, evaluated against federal minimum standards. Betting would be prohibited during live broadcasts of the sporting events being wagered on, and operators could not market to viewers during those broadcasts. Individuals under 21 and members of sports organizations would be barred from betting. Deposit limits and income verification requirements would apply as affordability protections, and operators would be required to fund treatment and education programs addressing gambling disorder. A national self-exclusion list would be coordinated through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Federal agencies would conduct an annual nationwide survey on the harm caused by online sports betting and report findings to Congress, and the Surgeon General would produce a report on the public health challenges tied to sports betting. Prop bets would be prohibited outright, and the use of artificial intelligence to target individual bettors would be restricted. GovTrack assigns H.R. 2087 a 3% chance of enactment, a figure consistent with the prognosis attached to every federal sports betting bill since 2018. Blumenthal told The Hill in December 2025 that the federal government should be involved in regulating sports betting, and he joined Senator Katie Britt, who led the effort, in sending a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi asking for a crackdown on illegal offshore gaming operations targeting youth, with Blumenthal serving as the Democratic co-lead.

The structural objections that have blocked every bill

Three objections have recurred across every federal sports betting bill introduced since 2018, and none of them has been resolved by either chamber. The first is fiscal. States have built entire budget lines around their own tax rates and regulatory structures, and New York's 51% rate on gross gaming revenue cannot be reconciled with any federal harmonization framework proposed so far. A federal floor meant to raise consumer protection standards could function instead as a ceiling, giving permissive states a federal benchmark they can treat as sufficient. The second objection is constitutional, and it traces directly back to the ruling that started this entire sequence. The same Tenth Amendment logic that struck down PASPA can be turned against a new federal mandate, and the finding that SWMIA "suffers from some of the same Tenth Amendment concerns as PASPA" shows that the problem did not disappear between 2018 and 2025. Every bill written to answer Murphy v. NCAA risks triggering the same constitutional objection that produced the ruling. The third objection comes from industry. The American Gaming Association and major operators have resisted uniform federal rules on advertising and affordability as distortions of a market that, left to the states, has produced record revenue. The official league data mandate in SWMIA drew industry opposition from the moment it was introduced, and the SAFE Bet Act's advertising restrictions have drawn a similar response. What unites all three objections is a coalition problem that has never been solved. SWMIA had the NFL's backing but lost the gaming industry. The SAFE Bet Act has public health advocates behind it but faces opposition from the industry and from states that have no interest in surrendering the revenue systems they have already built. No version of federal legislation has yet assembled a coalition large enough to clear all three objections at once, and that failure, repeated across two bills and seven years, is the pattern the fragmented state system has grown inside.

What the fragmented state system has produced

The system Congress left to the states functions, financially, at considerable scale. Regulated U.S. sportsbooks generated $16.80 billion in gross gaming revenue in 2025, processing handle in the hundreds of billions of dollars and returning billions in tax revenue to state governments. That is the strongest argument state regulators and the gaming industry can make for leaving the system as it stands. But the same system has not prevented, and in some respects has documented, real harm. Public opinion has moved alongside that data: a Pew Research Center survey of thousands of U.S. adults found that a growing majority now say legal sports betting is bad for society, a substantial increase from 2022. A National Council on Problem Gambling survey found that most American adults had gambled before age 21 despite the legal age being 21 in most states, and roughly a third of younger adults acknowledged placing sports bets while underage. State tax policy in 2025 moved in the direction Hatch warned about, though not in the form he predicted. Rather than a race to the bottom on consumer protection, states pursued a race upward on revenue extraction: Illinois moved from a flat tax rate to a tiered system and then added a per-bet fee, and multiple other states raised sports betting taxes to plug budget shortfalls. Federal tax policy added a further complication in the summer of 2025, when the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed by President Trump, substantially reduced the gambling loss deduction, prompting the bipartisan FULL HOUSE Act, S.2230 and HR.6985, introduced specifically to repeal that change. Seven years after Murphy v. NCAA, the question the ruling posed to Congress remains open, and the states have answered it in Congress's place.