An organization built for a smaller problem

The National Council on Problem Gambling is the closest thing the United States has to a national body responsible for gambling harm. The problem it’s responsible for has grown enormously in the last few years. The organization itself has not grown to match it — and in some ways, it’s moved backward.

 An estimated 170 million American adults may have gambled before they were legally old enough to. Young adults aged 18–24 have the highest rate of gambling addiction of any age group in the country, at a time when sports betting apps are engineered around speed, repetition, and push notifications specifically to keep people betting. Only around 15% of people say a doctor has ever asked them about their gambling habits at all – meaning the vast majority of people developing a problem are doing so with no health system checkpoint anywhere near them. Nearly 8 in 10 Americans now say gambling addiction is as serious as alcohol or drug addiction.

• The money doesn’t match the scale of the harm. NCPG’s most visible recent funding move was accepting $2 million over two years from Kalshi, a prediction-market platform currently being sued by multiple states for allegedly operating unlicensed sports gambling. Kalshi’s own annualized revenue was estimated at roughly $3.5 billion as of mid-2026 — up from about $735 million the year before — with sports contracts driving the large majority of that growth. Against that backdrop, $2 million over two years from a single company is a rounding error: it represents a tiny fraction of one year’s revenue for Kalshi, let alone a proportionate response to a problem now touching tens of millions of young Americans. If this is what “the industry funding harm reduction” looks like, it isn’t remotely proportionate.
• The people doing the actual work say they’re priced out. Clinicians and researchers who are hands-on with compulsive gamblers have said openly they can’t afford to attend NCPG’s own annual conference — the one event meant to bring together the people doing the frontline work the organization exists to support. An organization serious about matching the scale of the crisis would be subsidizing access for those people, not pricing them out.
• The people the organization was built to serve have been pushed out of its own leadership. NCPG’s board once required a majority of members with recovery experience. Today, out of roughly 15 board seats, only two or three are even earmarked for the possibility of someone from the recovery community — and there’s no guarantee that seat gets filled. An organization that is genuinely scaling up its response to a bigger problem should look more like the people affected by it over time, not less.
• The messaging hasn’t sharpened as the risk has grown. “Please gamble responsibly” is the same soft, low-friction phrase NCPG has used for years, even as the highest-risk population — 18-to-24-year-olds on apps built around live, in-game betting — has expanded. Other countries have already moved to harder, more direct warnings: chances are you’re about to lose. What is this really costing you? What are you prepared to lose today? That’s a public-health approach closer to what eventually got forced onto cigarette packaging. NCPG’s messaging hasn’t caught up to a problem this size.
• Accountability for outcomes is thin. When a multi-million-dollar partnership is announced, the basic follow-up questions — what specifically is this funding, how will its impact be measured, is it actually reaching the people most at risk — haven’t been answered with real specificity. For an organization operating at the scale this crisis demands, that’s not a minor gap.

The $2 million partnership with Kalshi didn’t create these problems, but it did put a spotlight on them. Kalshi is currently fighting lawsuits in multiple states, including Michigan, over whether its sports-related “event contracts” are, in substance, sports betting by another name; Kalshi maintains it’s a federally regulated derivatives exchange and not a gambling operator at all. Michigan’s Gaming Control Board withdrew its own membership from NCPG over the partnership, with its director writing that it “directly undermines state enforcement actions and risks weakening the positions of state regulatory bodies nationwide.” Nevada’s problem gambling council raised similar concerns about the optics of a major partnership landing in the middle of active litigation over whether the product itself is gambling.

What the episode really exposed, though, is an organization operating on a scale that doesn’t match its mandate — one for which even a modest industry check looks disproportionately significant, because the baseline of independent funding and resourcing is thin enough for $2 million to visibly move the needle on public perception.

Matching the actual size of this problem would mean funding levels that dwarf a single $2 million partnership rather than depend on one. It would mean a board where lived experience is structurally guaranteed, not reduced to a couple of optional seats. It would mean a conference and a body of research that frontline clinicians can actually afford to be part of. It would mean messaging that treats an addiction now touching tens of millions of Americans with the same bluntness other countries have already adopted. And it would mean transparent, specific accounting for where funding goes and whether it’s reaching the people most at risk — starting with 18-to-24-year-olds, the group the data says needs it most.

None of this requires assuming bad intent from anyone at NCPG. It’s entirely possible for an organization to be full of well-meaning, capable people and still be structurally undersized for the problem in front of it. But that’s exactly the gap that matters here: a crisis operating at national scale is currently being met by an organization whose funding, representation, and messaging all look built for a much smaller one.

Families dealing with a gambling addiction in real time don’t have the luxury of waiting for an organization to grow into the size of the problem. They need an advocacy body whose independence isn’t in question, honest messaging instead of soft disclaimers, and treatment that’s actually accessible and covered — now, not once funding and governance eventually catch up to the scale of what they’re facing.

 

Whether NCPG can become that organization, or whether it continues to be outpaced by a crisis that’s already bigger than its current footprint, is the real question — not an accusation, but a fair and overdue one.

If you or someone you love is struggling with sports betting, help is available. The National Problem Gambling Helpline can be reached 24/7 at 1-800-522-4700.