Too often, career politicians create new federal programs to great fanfare, but then fail to oversee the implementation of such programming to ensure the American people are well-served in practice. Senator Braun has demonstrated his commitment to ensuring effective implementation of the programs he has helped to create. Most recently, Senator Braun held the Social Security Administration (SSA) accountable for its implementation of a bill designed to give critical disability benefits to individuals with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, commonly known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. ALS is a neurodegenerative disease affecting the ability of the brain to control muscle movements. Individuals with ALS progressively lose the ability to speak, walk, and breathe. There is no effective treatment for the disease, no known cause, and—currently—no cure. At the end of the 116th Congress, the ALS Disability Insurance Access Act was signed into law. Importantly, this long overdue law eliminated a mandatory five-month waiting period for patients with medically-determined ALS. Simply put, individuals that are given a fatal diagnosis of ALS should not have to wait to access the benefits that they earned and are entitled to possess. Passage of this change was a priority for the Senate ALS Caucus, which Senator Braun co-chairs with Senator Chris Coons of Delaware. However, it soon became apparent that the SSA was not going to implement the bill as intended. SSA indicated that it did not plan to grant these key benefits to people diagnosed with ALS that were already in their five-month waiting period prior to the date of the new law’s enactment. As a result, Senator Braun quickly drafted yet more legislation (S. 579) in the 117th Congress to force SSA to implement the law as Congress intended—and now all individuals with ALS are to be given their federal entitlements. Since this set of bills became law, 5,154 ALS patients have been able to gain immediate access to their Social Security Disability benefits. This figure represents ten percent of all the ALS patients ever allowed SSDI benefits.