The American experiment can be summed up in one big idea: don’t put too much power in one place. That is why the federal government has three branches — executive, legislative and judicial.

Unfortunately, the modern presidency undermines that separation of powers and concentrates as much power as possible in itself. The best thing President Joe Biden can do as he leaves office is to cut the presidency back down to size.

Biden did the same thing most presidents do: give himself more power. That meant more spending and more regulations. Not only did this not solve any problems — the national debt is more than $36 trillion, inflation is still too high, and annual regulatory burdens are now more than $15,000 per household. Biden would win the lasting respect of the people with a bold parting gesture: returning legislating powers back to Congress.

The executive branch now does most of the legislating.

Congress passed 65 bills in 2023, but executive branch agencies issued 2,018 regulations. The difference is a factor of 46. Additional executive branch legislation comes from utterances from regulatory agencies: guidance documents, notices and press releases. The regulatory system is opaque, expensive, unfair and counterproductive. Congress’s lack of involvement is part of the reason.

Biden should return judiciary powers to courts. More than 40 regulatory agencies have their in-house court systems called administrative courts that operate outside the proper judicial branch. These agencies select their judges and pay their salaries. They set the rules for procedure and evidence and, perhaps not surprisingly, stack the deck in their favor. In these in-house agency courts, the government wins 90% of the time against only about 60% of cases in regular courts.

That is what it looks like when the president takes over other branches’ powers. We have checks and balances for good reason. They prevent abuse of power.

Where there isn’t abuse, there is incompetence. Washington can’t even build what its bill requires because the regulatory permits and environmental reviews take 4.5 years to finish before a shovel can break ground.

Executive branch agencies may start with a clear purpose but can’t resist expanding those missions. Biden initiated a “whole-of-government” management philosophy. That meant the Federal Reserve was tasked with slowing climate change and the EPA with addressing economic inequality, for example. Neither agency is suited to those new tasks.

Realistically, Biden won’t want to lose face by acknowledging this was a bad idea. So this reform — forcing agencies to stick to their original missions — must be left to the Trump administration.

The more power a president has, the more damage he can do. Each party warns about this when the other side takes power, but neither does anything about it. The least-followed rule in politics is not giving yourself any power you don’t want your opponents to have.

Ryan Young is a senior economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute/InsideSources