There's lot of mechanisms that could be tried, some might help, others might have bad unintended consequences. Ultimately our problem is that we have a depraved population. Who is it that said if every man was an angel, we wouldn't need government at all? We've never had a population of all angels, but there was certainly more moral and ethical fiber in the average person at one time.
One mechanism I favor is an automatic sunset provision. Almost any act of Congress should have an automatic sunset, requiring another act of Congress to postpone the sunset. You could tinker with this idea so that the most fundamentally obvious statutes can be enacted without sunset if there's a supermajority or something, but most of their legislation should be required to demonstrate its continued necessity every 10 years or so.
I think something similar should apply to the creation of agencies within the bureaucracy. The bureaucrats have accumulated far too much power, and as mentioned earlier in the thread their power in many cases rivals that of elected officials. That is intolerable. The entire bureaucracy needs to be made to know its inferior status at all times. This condition of the bureaucracy coincides with the evolution of the imperial presidency, the concentration of power in the executive. They'll say it was to fast track this or that, create flexibility here and flexibility there. Pragmatism is a dangerous thing in government.
