I'm sure most Presidents have done some shit like that.

No doubt at all about that. So have state governments, and probably everybody down to the municipal level. Hell, California has raised "cooking the books" to an art form.

Government is too big, and too powerful. Any good proposal to deal with our current problems should feature something that moves things in the opposite direction.

It's apparently hardwired into human leadership to want to run everything. Our Federal government has slowly encroached into dozens, maybe hundreds of things that used to be handled at state and local levels, absorbing the states into a single monolith. The statists in the EU are trying to do this to entire countries.