ABSTRACT
These frustrations over inefficient government led James Madison, in particular, to use “an efficiency argument” for creating, as a vital part of the nation’s new Constitution, a separate executive branch authorized to implement congressional legislation. “We have been taught that the separation of powers was meant to provide mutual checks, with consequent inefficiency in operation,” a consequence often hailed by political scientists as the reasonable price of protecting citizens from despotic governmental efficiency. But the founders’ “primary need was to achieve efficiency. . . . The modern cult of checks as the primary virtue of the Constitution was not shared by its framers.” Indeed not. The term “check” appears a mere five times in The Federalist Papers, and then only when referring to “governmental machinery,” and the word is nowhere to be found in the Constitution.4
