The Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry has again postponed the vote on Brian Quintenz to be the next chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) at the last minute, this time at the request of the White House.
Senators on the committee were due to vote on whether to recommend Quintenz’s nomination Monday. However, a spokesperson for the committee sent an updated schedule for the meeting at 3:32 p.m. — less than two hours before the meeting was set to begin — scratching Quintenz’s name, and replacing it with a vote on Richard Fordyce to be Under Secretary of Agriculture for Farm Production and Conservation.
A spokesperson for the Republican majority on the committee told InGame that, “The White House asked the committee to delay the vote.” Reasons why the White House made that decision were not provided, nor was a new time for the vote.
According to Bloomberg, Quintenz remains President Trump’s pick to run the commodities regulator despite the new delay.
Last week, Quintenz was removed from the schedule in similarly late fashion, reportedly due to one senator’s delayed flight. With all Democratic members of the committee expected to vote against Quintenz’s nomination, the full Republican contingent is needed to vote in his favor in order to ensure Quintenz could be approved. According to Bloomberg reporter Yash Roy, Cindy Hyde-Smith was unable to attend last week’s meeting due to a delayed flight, causing the vote to be pushed back a week.
It’s unlikely that the party-line nature of the vote has changed during the past week, meaning that again one Republican’s absence would likely have been enough to delay the vote.
Half an hour before Quintenz’s name was removed from the schedule, committee member Sen. Tommy Tuberville made a post on social media site X criticizing Democrats for voting against the president’s nominees. Tuberville, a senator for Alabama, had been in Tuscaloosa for an event on the afternoon of the meeting, and it is not clear if he was able to make it to the capitol in time for the vote.
If the committee ultimately does meet and vote to recommend Quintenz, the nomination would then proceed to the Senate floor, where all 100 senators would vote on whether to appoint him to the CFTC role. There are 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats in the Senate, and in the event of a tie, Vice President JD Vance would cast the deciding vote.
Quintenz expected to be hands-off
Quintenz, whose name was put forward by President Donald Trump in February, would be in charge of the regulation of prediction markets such as Kalshi and Railbird as chair of the CFTC. In this role, he could crystalize the regulator’s stance on sports event contracts, which some states and tribes have argued are an illegal form of sports betting.
Kalshi has argued in court that only the CFTC has the jurisdiction to shut down its sports markets.
In the role, he is widely expected to take a hands-off approach to these emerging products, and appears to support CFTC-registered exchanges offering sports event contracts. During a hearing on his nomination in June, Quintenz responded to tribal concerns about these contracts by noting tribes are free to offer them too.
Quintenz is currently a board member and shareholder of Kalshi. In an ethics letter, he pledged to resign from his board position and divest his shares if he becomes CFTC chair. As chair, Quintenz may have a particularly large degree of power over the CFTC, as he appears set to be its only commissioner, at least temporarily.
Normally, the regulator has five commissioners, but Acting Chair Caroline Pham is set to step down once Quintenz arrives, while Summer Mersinger and Christy Goldsmith Romero both exited at the end of May, and Kristin Johnson will leave “later this year.” The previous full-time chair, Rostin Behnam, left in February.
