Feds Approve $80 Million Budget for 'Private' Horse Racing Regulator

The government should exit the multi-million-dollar business of preventing horse doping.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority's (HISA) $80 million budget last week. Created in 2020 to regulate professional horse racing, HISA exemplifies costly federal overreach.*

The Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act of 2020, which passed with bipartisan support, created and tasked HISA to develop and oversee antidoping, medication control, and racetrack safety programs under the supervision of the FTC.* HISA raises revenue by requiring each state to fund its "proportionate share of the horseracing antidoping and medication control program and the racetrack safety program," per the FTC.

The state racing commissions meet this obligation by imposing "foal registration fees, sales contributions, starter fees, and track fees" on horse racers and breeders, according to the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act.* While the FTC claims that HISA "serves the goals of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act in a prudent and cost-effective manner," the agency's budget says otherwise.

The lion's share of the Authority's approved 2025 budget is not allocated for ensuring racetrack safety ($3 million) or veterinary services for horses ($916,000)—both of which should be privately insured and provided, respectively—but for the $58.6 million antidoping and medication control budget. The budget mostly comprises costs of sample collection and testing "for post-race, out-of-competition, and TCO2 [total carbon dioxide] testing," which the Authority outsources to the Horseracing Integrity and Welfare Unit (HIWU), a division of Drug Free Sport International, a full-service provider in antidoping services.

In 2025, HISA will pay $6.7 million to cover the salaries of 36 full-time HIWU employees who work exclusively for the Authority. Additional expenses include $1 million for travel, $7 million for technology, supplies, and professional services, and $2.8 million for so-called management fees: "the profit amount to HIWU for administering the program….a negotiated amount of 8% of the total expenses incurred for services that HIWU provides directly and 4% for everything else."

HISA allocates $2.4 million to compensate its nine administrative department employees, all of whose salaries "are based on market rates." In addition to office rent and travel expenses, HISA's 2025 budget also provides $420,000 for professional public relations services and $100,000 for "a white paper on the benefits provided by security cameras in shedrows": the walkway between rows of horse stalls in a barn.

The safety of horse races, equine health, and fairness of competitions are all important goals—for the narrow segment of the population that owns and races thoroughbreds. The equine professionals involved in horseracing and breeding should be left to determine and enforce their own standards instead of being subjected to federal regulation of dubious constitutionality.*

*CORRECTION: The original version of this article misstated the funding mechanism for the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA). The article has been amended in several places to clarify that the Authority is not taxpayer-funded.

Comments

[Daddyhill]

The federal budget deficit for 2024 is about 1.8 trillion dollars. Cutting 80 million out of the budget, perhaps laudable in this instance, would save only an extremely small fraction of said deficit. Do you propose to limit or eliminate deficit spending by chipping away at it like this, using hair clippers when a chain saw is required? Could we see your proposal for sharpening and actually using that saw? Entitlements? Nah, too toxic to touch those. Defense? Nah, the Pentagon and the defense lobbyists would lose their shit, so also too toxic to touch. Downsize the government by 50%? Nah, nobody would be left who knows how to do things, like distribute S.S. benefits and evaluate defense contract bids. Hmm, come to think of it, maybe we wouldn't need defense bid evaluations, or even the bidding itself. We could simply award the contracts to our most politically loyal friends and relatives. And anyway, who cares if they'll charge $700 for a hammer?

[Idaho-Bob]

Defeatist attitude.

How do you eat an elephant?

[Eeyore]

Invite both political parties over for an elephant eating party.

[Gaear Grimsrud]

I'm told it tastes like chicken.

[Rossami]

Alternatively - If you can't even kill an obvious program like this (that's also so new that it does't have entrenched rent-seekers), how do you expect to be able to kill the hard ones?

[Chumby]

Someone has to pony up the cash to pay for this. Taxpayer likely to be saddled with additional government expansion.

[Don't look at me!]

They will settle this with some old fashioned horse trading.

[Gaear Grimsrud]

Dunno. I feel like Nick is just beating a dead horse here.

[Chumby]

Who do you think Trump will appoint to be Secretariat of HISA?

[Rick James]

Speaking of Horse Races, Oakland just recalled its hyper-woke, Soros-funded Mayor AND District Attorney.

SF's BLM/HYPER woke mayor kicked out as well.

Now let's get some esoteric federal data on all those closed storefronts and zombieland downtowns are doing better than ever.

[Rick James]

Consequences, bitches.

[Eeyore]

Lingchi.

[Roberta]

I don't see why this couldn't be done by the race tracks, since they have the money, the interest, and the means.

This program is an extension of the same idea that produced and maintains the state racing commissions: that left to their own devices, horse handicapping is an inherently crooked business. But if they're inherently crooked, why not let them be crooked? I think the idea there is that people should not be allowed to enjoy crookedness even among themselves and with knowledge of the risks — that there's just something evil about gambling, or at least about gambling on certain things.

Same story with fighting-style professional competitions. However, that settled into a pattern whereby wrestling took itself out of consideration by the acceptance of all that it would be fixed, i.e. non-competitive.

[Uncle Jay]

"Feds Approve $80 Million Budget for 'Private' Horse Racing Regulator."

...and then the governing class in DC wonders why foreign powers laugh at America.

[Daddyhill]

This should be a slam dunk for those wishing to repeal the HISA. Not because of the arcane constitutional issues discussed here, though, nor because of the price tag. The Act seems to benefit a relatively small group of people, those who own and race horses, and a much larger group, those who bet on horse races. The former are mostly very wealthy people with millions of dollars at stake, who undoubtedly have an interest in the integrity of their investments and who seek to control the breeding industry the way a monarchy controls its blood lines.

The latter are large numbers of ordinary people who engage in legalized gambling (it's about money, not sport) at the track. The latter may or may not get paid (the house always wins, of course), while the former undoubtedly get paid one way or another. Federal subsidies, large or small, should be reserved for industries that benefit at least a two-thirds majority of all Americans. To me, this issue is not worth the very expensive time of the SCOTUS, to say nothing of the paltry 80 million (out of the 3 trillion dollar federal budget. Congress should be able to fix the problem very quickly by simply repealing the HISA; Congress does have the power to do that.