For far too long, legislators have shirked the responsibility the Framers assigned to them: aggressive oversight of the executive branch.

The news cycle moves so fast these days that you could almost forget we had a breathless news cycle over a supposedly imminent constitutional crisis just two weeks ago. The assumptions fueling that transient panic — that the president would ignore court orders forcing him to abandon his efforts to reclaim control over the executive branch — have not materialized. That is generally (although not entirely) because the courts have avoided permanently enjoining Trump from exerting his authority over his administration. The panic has not, however, subsided.

“The Justice Department told Senate Democrats earlier this month that it will not defend long-standing safeguards that prevent the president from firing the heads of ‘multi-member regulatory commissions’ without cause,” Semafor reported on Tuesday. In addition, “Trump signed an executive order that directed all independent agencies to run proposed regulations by the White House.” According to the “legal experts” surveying the scene, the president’s efforts to reclaim his authority over so-called independent agencies, inspectors general, and even his ability to fire his subordinates is unbound by propriety. Indeed, even agencies like the Federal Reserve — an institution designed to be removed from the day-to-day political fray so that American monetary policy doesn’t begin to resemble its disastrous fiscal policy — may see its autonomy erode.

These speculative fears are not entirely unfounded. On balance, however, the Trump administration’s reforms are a vital component of an effort to restore accountability to the runaway federal bureaucracy, and they are long overdue. Nor can they be called “radical,” as some maintain. As AEI’s Yuval Levin wrote of the president’s executive order limiting the authority of “independent regulatory agencies,” the initiative represents “the natural completion of the regulatory reform Ronald Reagan launched with Executive Order 12291 44 years ago, almost to the day, back in 1981.” Likewise, the Trump administration’s “structural deregulation” campaign, which includes compelling executive agencies to submit to an Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs audit of their directives to ensure the executive branch is not legislating via regulation, is just basic civic hygiene.

These are not Trumpian priorities. Curtailing the impertinence of the executive agencies operating under the delusion that they derived some authority that did not devolve from the president himself is a long-standing conservative priority. Nor would the Founders regard any of this as exceptional. Regardless of whether Trump should attack the notion of independent agencies, inspectors general, Humphrey’s Executor, and a host of other precedents limiting the president’s agency, no student of Madisonian government could be surprised to see one branch of the federal government seeking to secure as much power for itself as possible. What would bewilder them is the extent to which the legislature has refused to engage in that same project. Trump’s initiatives could be salutary in that sense, too, insofar as they create incentives for Congress to be a jealous steward of its prerogatives again.

For far too long, congressional lawmakers have deferred to party loyalty and partisanship to do the work the Constitution’s framers assigned to them — applying aggressive oversight to the executive branch, providing it with firm direction in statute regarding how U.S. law will be administered, and so on. When the president’s party is in control of Congress, its members can afford to outsource those roles. Sometimes, a scandalous inspector general’s report will inflame Congress, or a quasi-independent actor in the executive branch will go out over his or her skis. But unless and until the opposing party controls Congress, the president often evades responsibility (and, therefore, accountability) by virtue of his circumscribed authority over his own branch.

There will always be enterprising ladder climbers who seek to absolve their party’s leader of responsibility for the actions of his subordinates — the tsar never seems to be aware of what’s happening in the countryside. But when it is the role of Congress to exercise that oversight or be blamed for the consequences, and semi-independent agencies no longer provide lawmakers with a way to posture as though they are mere critics of and spectators to the workings of government, there will be fewer incentives for lawmakers to abdicate their authority.

Trump’s reclamation of executive power is not a panacea, nor will it solve the problem of blind partisanship. It took us a generation to get ourselves into this mess, and it will take one to get us out. But setting the constitutional order right in one branch is unlikely to have salutary effects that are limited to that branch.