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To a large degree, I think this is because the people on the ground have asked for too much. It's not that the people have too little power- that was what the BoR and the Amendments are an attempt at mitigating (and were to a large degree successful)- it's that they have too much.
Regulatory agencies are an instance of this- they employ lots of people and execute a quasi-popular mandate, but that mandate is also extremely conservative (or "safe") and the agencies [have] become self-licking ice cream cones. Thus the central government becomes, by virtue of those employed at these agencies (and those who do business with them, to a lesser degree) having a vote, captured by those special interests, and Congress (being beholden to them) has become too weak to purge them. That is why it is completely ineffective against them- if Congress moved against the agencies, the people employed by them would purge Congress.
The best thing would be to disenfranchise anyone who works for those public agencies simply because it's a massive conflict of interest. The Founders got it right by not permitting DC to vote, but that has to apply to every public employee (and aside from China, no state at that time was powerful enough to have a bureaucracy of that size, so it's natural they overlooked this). In doing that, that the rest of the citizenry has a better chance of keeping them working in the public interest, not just the interest of the agency. In turn, the agencies must keep the citizenry on board with their agendas (which is in part why RFK is in the position that he is).
This is kind of why emperors get into the positions that make them emperors- the citizens wage a [civil] war, put one of them on the throne, and that generally solves the bureaucracy problem (but creates some obvious others). Elections actually do still allow the average citizen to impose some of their will, but for how long that remains the case remains to be seen.
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