When the Game Changes

Dan Tate ’84 built a life on leadership—and now he’s using it to challenge one of medicine’s most confounding and relentless diseases

BY AMY ARGETSINGER ’86

Dan grew up in politics. Born in Georgia, he moved with his parents to Washington, D.C, when his father joined the Capitol Hill staff of Sen. Herman Talmadge; Dan Sr. eventually took a key role in the White House as Jimmy Carter’s liaison to the U.S. Senate. His mother, Tina, took a job on the Hill as well, at the House Radio-TV Gallery, where she became its first female director. 

Their long work hours in the city required them to find after-school activities for their only child. So they were drawn to St. Stephen’s, just blocks from their home in a cul-de-sac off Colonel Ellis Avenue, which allowed Dan to thrive in football and other afternoon sports starting in fifth grade. 

He quickly emerged as a leader.

“He is as true to himself as anyone I’ve ever known,” says his classmate John, a lifelong friend who played both football and lacrosse with Dan. “People sense that about him. And so they trust him. And they should.” 

Even amid his gilded high school career, though, he got his first taste of professional politics when he volunteered on Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign in the summer before his senior year, during the early run-up to Maine’s Democratic caucus. At Amherst College in Massachusetts, Dan continued to play football and lacrosse and served as a residential counselor before taking his new political science and English degree home to the Beltway. At 21, he joined the staff of Louisiana’s Rep. Billy Tauzin as a legislative aide, specializing in energy policy; later, he notched agency experience as a deputy assistant secretary for legislative affairs at the Department of Energy. By 30, he was working in Bill Clinton’s White House—in the same  office his father held two decades earlier, lobbying Congress on behalf of the president. Though Dan Jr. focused on the moderate members who control the fate of most hard-fought legislation, he dealt with lawmakers across the political spectrum to gain approval for a balanced budget, FDA reforms and a bailout of Mexico, among other issues

Before Bill Clinton left office, Dan made the leap into the private sector, joining the same lobbying firm as his father. In 2012, he and a former White House colleague, Jeff Forbes, launched their own shop. Forbes Tate became one of the city’s most lucrative lobbying practices. 

Two years later, Dan was reading to his young daughter before bedtime when he found himself struggling with the words. He liked to take on different voices for the different characters, and suddenly he could not.

“My tongue felt fat and clumsy,” he recalls in an interview at his office midway between the White House and the Capitol. “I knew something was off.”

2019 Hall of Fame group photo of Dan and some of his football teammates who attended to honor him: 
Chris Dyson ’84, Ted Hart ’84, John Freeman ’84, Scott Ohnegian (college teammate), Dan, Scott Nelson ’85, Bear Geschickter ’85, and John Delnegro ’85.

For several years, his symptoms were primarily limited to voice weakness and fatigue. His doctors were baffled. It wasn’t until 2017 that he finally got a solid diagnosis at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

ALS is the terminal neurodegenerative disease that first gained public attention when it struck Lou Gehrig in 1939. The Yankee slugger died just two years later, a speedy but not atypical trajectory. In recent decades, the disease has perhaps become better associated with groundbreaking physicist Stephen Hawking, who beat the odds by living with the condition for more than 50 years, most of that time largely immobile and speaking through a computer-synthesized voice. 

“No one ever wants to hear ALS,” Dan says, recalling the diagnosis. “But I had been dealing with this for several years,” and he understood that something was seriously wrong. 

“It sucks. But almost better to know than to not know. Almost.”

I Am ALS Founder Brian Wallach with Dan enjoying the outdoors before a board meeting.

Dan suspects that he may have been inherently vulnerable to ALS but that the repeated blows he took in high-contact sports probably triggered the nerve-cell damage that brought on the disease. “The way I played football from the time I was in the third grade all the way through college was probably a contributor. And I played running back, so every play I had a big collision.”

Still, he was not immediately interested when he started getting phone calls from two other Washington insiders, married couple Brian Wallach and Sandra Abrevaya, who were eager to get him involved in the ALS cause.

Brian, a former federal prosecutor and Obama White House staffer, was also diagnosed in 2017, on the same day their second child came home from the hospital. He and Sandra, a former press secretary for Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois and later the Department of Education, could not believe that there was no solution, no protocol to follow. So they resolved to use his remaining time – doctors initially advised him he would be dead in six months — tackling ALS like a political campaign. 

ALS had recently enjoyed a moment in the spotlight, thanks to the improbably viral “Ice Bucket Challenge” of 2014. Launched on social media by a pair of patients in their early 30s, the stunt challenged friends to drench themselves on camera with a vat of ice water or donate to ALS causes, such as the now 40-year-old ALS Association. The challenge raised more than $200 million, of which about $115 million went to research, allowing the ALS Association to nearly triple the amount it could hand out in grants to scientists. Some promising breakthroughs followed, including the identification of five new genes connected to the disease. (Ironically, Dan had participated in the Challenge.)

I Am ALS Legislative Affairs Team Co-Chair Jack Silva, Vice President Dustin Watson, Chief Executive Officer Andrea Goodman, and Board Member Dan Tate (far right) joined actor Eric Dane (left of Dan) in a meeting with ALS champion Congressman. Frank Pallone (center). [Photo courtesy of I Am ALS]

Yet half a decade later, the fad had burned out, and polls found that most Americans couldn’t even remember what cause the Ice Bucket Challenge had benefited. Brian and Sandra realized that to find a cure, the ALS community needed to find a way to build a more sustained movement. More so than cancer and other diseases, ALS burns through its most ardent activists at a horrific rate. “We die quickly,” Brian told a congressional committee in 2019. “We don’t have time to advocate.”

Brian and Sandra had met on the 2008 Obama campaign, where they also got to know Jeff Forbes. The lobbyist told them about his business partner Dan—“this incredible government strategist,” as Sandra puts it—who was grappling with the same condition. 

“We pursued him,” she says. “We emailed him, we texted him, we had friends nudge him and say, ‘Brian and Sandra are trying to get in touch with you.’”

They wrote a bill, dubbed the Accelerating Access to Critical Therapies for ALS Act authorizing $100 million a year for research over five years. ACT for ALS, as it became known, also established new FDA guidelines making it easier for ALS patients who had timed out of clinical trials to continue getting access to the drugs being tested. 

The three made a formidable team for the task at hand: Brian had spent much of his career in community organizing and knew how to create online and offline networks that could bring more advocates to the fight, while Sandra’s work in communications prepped her to tell the story of how policies affect people. 

“But neither Brian nor I had experience running a legislative campaign,” she says. Dan had been doing just that for nearly 30 years. “Dan is a very strategic and sophisticated thinker. He understands all the relationships on the Hill, the interplay between different members, the dynamics of different committees and even the staff members on these committees.”

Dan speaks in terms of a “virtuous circle” that propels a successful lobbying effort—engaging constituents in a cause, so that they will reach out to elected officials with their requests; lawmakers taking action, which then empowers the community to continue to engage with the issue.

It worked. In December 2021, the House passed ACT for ALS on a vote of 423 to 3. The following week, the Senate passed it unanimously, and by the end of the month, then-President Joe Biden signed it into law. 

Unlike his friend Brian, Dan is still able to talk, though his words are increasingly hard to make out. He uses a wheelchair now and grows more quickly fatigued. He says he will likely retire soon. 

But, the captain of the football team remains his confident, charismatic self.

He looks back at those chaotic months when doctors couldn’t figure out what was going on with him; one physician initially suggested in 2016 that Dan had ALS, only to reverse his diagnosis when an electroencephalogram test seemed to rule it out. Of course, doctors dread having to issue a diagnosis of ALS. 

“Back then, it was considered a death sentence,” Dan says. “There was nothing even remotely available to treat it.”

He is using the past tense. Is it no longer a death sentence, then, in his view?

Indeed, Dan feels his symptoms have been partially mitigated by a new generation of treatments. One, Radicava, was only just approved by the FDA in 2017, the same year he was diagnosed. He credits another drug, CNM-Au8, which is still under development, with restoring some of his vocal strength.     

“I feel hope,” he says, “and we didn’t four years ago.”

Amy Artgetsinger ’86 has been a staff writer with  The Washington Post since 1995.