The Founders’ strategy was institutionalized competition.

From The Upside-Down Constitution and Its Critics by Michael S. Greve.

Explicating the Constitution’s logic in economistic terms has numerous advantages. Most importantly, it sheds light on our constitutional history and development. The Founders understood that the hard constitutional task isn’t really to divide powers between branches or levels of government on mere “parchment,” in Madison’s dismissive term. The hard task is to stabilize the constitutional arrangement over time. The Founders’ strategy, to repeat, was institutionalized competition.

Try as you might, though, to lock institutions into rivalry and competition: in politics as in markets, the institutional actors’ perennial temptation is to collude against citizen-consumers. The people’s agents are repeat players, and over time, they will discover institutional technologies to extract surplus. They will agree to deploy those technologies and to divvy up the surplus amongst themselves somewhere down the road. We have names for those innovations: “the administrative state.” “Cooperative federalism.”