Gambling Lobby Spent Big. Congress Moved to Cut Bettors' Tax Bills.
PENN Entertainment hired a dedicated sports gambling lobbying firm as bipartisan House sponsors from Nevada and Ohio pushed legislation that would directly benefit the industry's customer base —...
The single most documented fact in this money trail is this: PENN Entertainment, operator of ESPN Bet and Hollywood Casino properties across multiple states including Ohio, made a confirmed decision to retain a dedicated lobbying firm for sports gambling issues at the precise moment the FULL HOUSE Act was being advanced through two simultaneous procedural vehicles in Congress. The legislation would restore the full gambling loss deduction under the Internal Revenue Code — a change that lowers the effective after-tax cost of gambling for millions of American bettors, directly supporting the transaction volume on which PENN and its competitors depend.
The FULL HOUSE Act was introduced by Rep. Max Miller (R-OH-7) and Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV-4), two members whose districts are among the most gambling-exposed in the country by direct economic measure. Ohio legalized sports betting in January 2023; PENN Entertainment operates Hollywood Casino Columbus and Hollywood Casino Toledo in that state. Horsford's district sits in suburban Las Vegas, where the casino economy is the dominant private employer. Neither sponsor's geographic alignment with the gambling industry is subtle, and neither is disclosed as coincidental by the public record — it is structural.
The legislation's procedural history sharpens the picture. In January 2026, Miller and Horsford jointly submitted the FULL HOUSE Act as an amendment before the House Rules Committee, according to legis1.com. One month later, Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV-1) — who represents downtown Las Vegas and the Strip corridor, the single most gambling-concentrated congressional district in the United States by economic composition — filed a discharge petition on the parallel FAIR BET Act, seeking 218 signatures to force a floor vote after the bill had sat dormant in the Ways and Means Committee for eight months. Discharge petitions are rare procedural weapons. Their use signals that normal channels have either failed or been blocked, and that stakeholders with a direct material interest in the outcome have exhausted patience with committee inaction.
The legal architecture governing how gambling industry money reaches these legislators is itself a documented system. The Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, as amended, requires registered lobbying firms to disclose the specific issues they are retained to address, the individual lobbyists deployed, and the aggregate fees paid, in semi-annual filings with the Senate Office of Public Records. The Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 added a separate but connected requirement: registered lobbyists who bundle campaign contributions exceeding $19,800 per filing period to federal candidates must disclose that activity under 2 U.S.C. § 1604(d). This means that any registered gambling industry lobbyist who solicits and delivers contributions to Miller, Horsford, or Titus above that threshold is simultaneously generating records in two separate federal databases — the LDA system and the FEC's campaign finance system — enforced by two separate agencies. Columbia Law School professor Richard Briffault, in published scholarship, characterized HLOGA's bundling provision as Congress's first statutory recognition that lobbying and campaign finance are co-deployed instruments toward the same legislative outcomes, not independent activities.
The tax policy argument made by the FULL HOUSE Act's sponsors is straightforward: under the current 90-percent cap, a taxpayer who wins $10,000 and loses $10,000 in a calendar year reports net zero gambling income but can only deduct $9,000 in losses, generating $1,000 in phantom taxable income on money never actually taken home. Rep. Miller's official press release states that 'Americans should not be taxed on money they didn't actually take home.' The individual equity argument is not without merit on its face. What the press release does not address is that the primary economic beneficiaries of increased gambling participation — driven in part by more favorable tax treatment — are not individual bettors but commercial operators whose gross gaming revenue scales with volume. PENN Entertainment's ESPN Bet platform, competing in the most crowded segment of the sports betting market, has a direct revenue interest in policies that reduce friction for bettors.
The prediction markets fight running parallel to this legislation adds a further dimension. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Adam Schiff (D-CA), and John Curtis (R-UT) introduced the Prediction Markets Are Gambling Act in early 2026, which would subject platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket to gambling regulation rather than CFTC oversight. Traditional casino and sports betting operators — PENN among them — have a competitive interest in seeing prediction markets classified as gambling, since it would disadvantage a growing rival for the same discretionary entertainment dollar. The same lobbying infrastructure and campaign contribution networks that are pushing the FULL HOUSE Act may be simultaneously deployed on the prediction markets fight, creating a unified industry legislative agenda with multiple simultaneous pressure points on Capitol Hill.
What the public record does not yet show — and what independent verification would reveal — is the specific dollar amounts contributed by PENN Entertainment's PAC, the American Gaming Association's PAC, DraftKings, FanDuel, MGM Resorts, and Caesars Entertainment to the campaign committees of Miller, Horsford, and Titus in the two election cycles preceding this legislation's introduction. Those figures exist in FEC filings and are publicly searchable at fec.gov. Also unverified: the name of the specific lobbying firm retained by PENN Entertainment for sports gambling issues, the dollar value of that contract, the individual lobbyists deployed, and whether any of them have filed HLOGA bundling disclosures connecting their fundraising activity to any of the three House members named here. The Senate Office of Public Records LDA database at lobbyingdisclosure.senate.gov holds those answers. Finally, the Ways and Means Committee chairman's documented position on the FULL HOUSE Act — and any communications between committee staff and gambling industry representatives during the eight months the companion bill sat without a hearing — would be the fullest accounting of where the bottleneck actually sits. A targeted FOIA request to Treasury's Office of Legislative Affairs, combined with a direct audit of the Ways and Means Committee's official correspondence log, is the instrument that would close that gap.