DOGE Veterans Are Landing Big Jobs in the Forecast Market

Polymarket is everywhere it’s close light nowadays, like market forecasting giant fight with hundreds about legal battles about how it might work. But one hiring decision has remained under the radar: Late last year, Polymarket brought on former Department of Labor colleague Jonathan Mendelson as its chief technology officer.

Before he started his work on Elon Musk called DOGEMendelson worked as an investor at Accel in San Francisco, which invests in technology companies. At DOGE, Mendelson was employed by the General Services Administration, but served as an adviser to Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Paul Atkins. He stayed there for less than a year. Polymarket, which is currently facing an investigation from Commodity Futures Trading Commissiondeclined to comment on the matter. The SEC did not respond to requests for comment.

Mendelson is not the only former DOGE with influence in the prediction market. Elie Mishory, a former CFTC commissioner who helped establish the regulation of the prediction markets, served as Kalshi’s general counsel and chief regulator in 2025 before stepping down. lead DOGE efforts at the SEC, where he worked with Mendelson. In June, he worked as the director of legal and regulatory affairs at Novig, a new, high-income sports betting market. “Elie has been at the forefront of the most innovative developments in the prediction markets – he helped move them from the center of attention to the global conversation,” Jacob Fortinsky, founder and CEO of Novig, said in announcing his hiring.

Mishory tells WIRED that joining the prediction market firm was a “natural fit” from his work at DOGE’s SEC. There, he says he prioritized talking to staff about how to streamline operations, and then tried to implement their suggestions about changing administrative processes or getting rid of redundant software. He was quick to note that his experience at DOGE was “unusual” in part because he did not focus on cutting staff. (The SEC said losing 18 percent of its employees in 2025; on the contrary DOGE-destroyed institutions like United States Agency for International Development(most of the cuts were voluntary purchases.)

“My style of DOGE was finding people who were experts,” he says. “People who used the app, not just people who bought the app, to hear the voice.” In Mishory’s eyes, this is similar to how prophecies “democratize” knowledge by rewarding people based on their performance. He also sees the combination of appetite for risk in DOGE and market position in forecasting. Indeed, the way DOGE brought it young, inexperienced professionals reorganizing the federal government’s glasses of how many large retail companies, including Polymarket and Novig, are led by twentysomethings and resume thin.

These works have been created during a time of turmoil, which is politically charged in the industry. As prediction markets become more and more popular, many government regulators and policy makers are calling for ways to improve their performance, they say. supporting corruption and violating state gambling laws.

In many ways, these companies represent the epicenter of the crisis in a startup culture that promotes speed in order to reform organizations, while regulators struggle to keep up. Although many critics say that the prediction markets and the betting trade are playing underground, the leaders of the area want to compete with the world’s largest markets and futures markets. They have found allies in the Trump Administration, especially if Donald Trump Jr. is a consultant to Polymarket and Kalshi, and the TV company owned by the Trump family Truth Social has done. trade agreement and Crypto.com market predictions.