John Chachas spent much of 2022 watching a country that had just been through a national emergency refuse to learn from its experience. Three years of pandemic data sat in state health departments, school district files, and unemployment offices across the country. Nobody with the credibility and independence to produce findings both sides would accept was analyzing them.
In March 2023, Chachas and Tom C. Korologos, a White House veteran under several Republican presidents and former U.S. ambassador to Belgium, made the case in the Wall Street Journal for a bipartisan commission led by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. The design was methodologically specific: exclude the architects of the original policy, assemble people with standing from both parties, follow the data wherever they lead. "Let's use the data," they wrote, "not run from them because they're politically uncomfortable."
Since then, the data they wanted examined have kept arriving, and the costs they were flagging have come into sharper focus.
On education: research published in 2025 drawing on PISA international assessment data confirmed that school closures were directly responsible for measurable learning loss, with each additional week out of the classroom increasing academic decline further. By the end of the 2024 school year, the average American student still needed the equivalent of nearly five additional months of schooling to catch up to pre-pandemic baselines in reading. High-income districts were four times more likely to recover than low-income ones. The communities that could least absorb the disruption took the most lasting damage.
On public health trust: one in every six Americans remain insufficiently vaccinated, a figure that reflects a collapse in confidence in federal guidance that a credible independent review might have helped address or at minimum honestly explain.
The more modest case for what such a commission could have produced is a shared factual foundation, developed by people with standing on both sides, insulated from the institutional defensiveness that has left federal public health agencies alternately over-explaining and under-examining their own decisions. Three years on, the country still doesn't have that foundation.
That pattern, rapid action under pressure, political distortion of the analysis afterward, no independent retrospective, no accountability mechanism, is not unique to pandemics. Chachas sees it playing out in real time in two arenas where he has professional standing to make the observation.
Artificial Intelligence
The first is artificial intelligence.
Congress has been circling AI regulation for years. In 2025, state legislatures introduced more than 1,200 AI-related bills across all fifty states. Estimates show that fewer than 12 percent became law. The White House released a National Policy Framework for AI in March 2026, but substantive federal legislation remains stalled by the same partisan dynamics that prevented a serious Covid accountability review.
Chachas has been direct about the stakes.
"There will come a point when technology is not containable," he said. He returns often to the 1983 film WarGames, in which a military supercomputer nearly launches nuclear missiles after escaping human control. The film's scenario, a machine that exceeds its operators' ability to constrain it, doesn't register as fiction to him. "We might not be able to contain the technologies we are creating. That's a big problem."
On the economic consequences, his position is blunt. AI will produce fewer real jobs and more make-work, and the workers who bear those costs aren't the ones capturing the profits. His prescription maps directly to the commission logic: identify the damage, name the parties responsible, and require them to fund the remedy.
He has proposed that corporations deploying AI in ways that displace workers be made "automatically liable for payment into a UBI Trust Fund." As he put it: "If corporations want to reap all the profits that AI can indeed produce, they will have to be compulsory funders of a UBI Trust Fund to pay for the millions of workers who are left out of the workforce."
Congress cleared one narrow piece of this problem in 2025, passing the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which criminalized the nonconsensual publication of intimate deepfakes. Chachas had flagged exactly this risk years earlier. "The misuse and abuse of personal images and likeness in an age of AI is going to be a major issue that has to be adjudicated," he wrote. "It has been largely ignored, and the longer it is ignored, the more problematic it will become." The deepfake law addressed one clause. The broader architecture of AI accountability remains unbuilt.
What's missing in AI policy, as it was missing with Covid, is the independent analytical framework that separates the people who built the technology and profit from its deployment from the people evaluating its consequences. The peer-review logic Chachas and Korologos applied to pandemic policy applies equally well here. You don't let the researchers who ran the study chair the committee that evaluates it.
Local Media
The second arena is local media.
Chachas has spent his career at the center of American media, advising on the $18 billion buyout of Clear Channel Communications, Disney's sale of ABC Radio, and other defining transactions in the industry's consolidation period. He currently runs INYO Broadcast Holdings, which operates television stations across more than a dozen major markets. The industry he's watched for three decades has shed 75 percent of its newspaper workforce since 2005.
In 2025 alone, 136 local news organizations closed or merged out of existence, more than two per week. More than 270,000 newspaper jobs have vanished since 2005. More than half of the country's 3,143 counties now have little to no local news coverage. Roughly 55 million Americans live in communities where local journalism is functionally absent.
"The use and taking of content produced by newspapers by the likes of Google and Facebook is criminal," Chachas has written. "The big and destructive power of Google and Facebook was left totally unchecked until the local media industry was essentially destroyed."
He sees this as a democratic problem, not only an economic one. Local newspapers covered city council meetings, investigated corrupt officials, reported on school board decisions. The tech platforms that expropriated their content and gutted their advertising revenue have no incentive to replace any of that coverage. "Do any of those giants report on anything local?" Chachas has asked. "Local murders? Accidents? Local weather? No." The civic infrastructure that once kept communities informed and held local power accountable has quietly disappeared, and the national conversation has mostly failed to reckon with what that means.
A commission framework applied to media policy could establish with rigor what market forces and political will have failed to clarify: exactly how the concentration of digital advertising into two platforms gutted local news economics, what regulatory structures have preserved local journalism in comparable democracies, and what a viable policy framework to sustain it would require. The tech companies that benefited from the expropriation Chachas describes are not disinterested parties. Neither are the journalists who covered the story. The people who designed the policies that allowed it to happen are not the right evaluators of those policies.
Bring Back Country Before Party with Bipartisan Commissions
The Covid commission Chachas and Korologos proposed in 2023 was a specific answer to a specific crisis. The methodology embedded in it, rigorous data analysis, bipartisan leadership with no stake in defending the original decisions, and clear questions with empirical answers, is a template with considerably broader application.
"Don't we owe it to ourselves," Chachas and Korologos asked, "to understand what the data in the aftermath tell us?"
They were asking about Covid. Three years later, the same question is overdue for artificial intelligence and for the slow-moving collapse of local news. The data exist in both cases. The analytical framework Chachas described exists. What's missing, in all three arenas, is the political will to use it.
